Wayne David: What recent discussions he has had with the Welsh Assembly Government on how convergence funding will be spent in west Wales and the valleys.

Betty Williams: What discussions he has had with Cabinet and Welsh Assembly Government colleagues about convergence funding in west Wales and the valleys.

Nick Ainger: My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State and I have regular discussions with Cabinet and Welsh Assembly Government colleagues on a range of issues, including convergence funding for west Wales and the valleys.

Wayne David: I thank the Minister for that reply, and I am sure that he will agree that the objective 1 programme has been a great success in west Wales and the valleys. Looking to the future, however, does he agree that we need to build on that success and to ensure that convergence funding is focused on the areas of greatest need, and that there is a complementarity of existing Government programmes and a strategic focus on how the money is spent?

Nick Ainger: I certainly agree with my hon. Friend about the success of the objective 1 programme. The statistics covering the objective 1 area of west Wales and the valleys show that unemployment there has fallen by more than 22 per cent. compared with a12 per cent. fall in the UK. They also show that average earnings since 2001 have risen by 21 per cent. in west Wales and the valleys compared with a UK average rise of 17 per cent. A range of other statistics also shows just how successful the past objective 1 programme has been. We are now moving into the convergence funding programme, and the Assembly has rightly decided—along the lines of my hon. Friend's suggestion—that it will focus on fewer but more strategic projects, targeting resources where they will have the greatest impact—namely, on skills, research and development, and innovation, to build on the success of the objective 1 programme. It is worth reminding Members what the Opposition said about objective 1—

Betty Williams: Does my hon. Friend agree that the wise investment of the objective 1 funding in Wales has secured the future protection of both traditional and modern, 21st century industries? Examples includea £1 million investment in Conwy port in my constituency, which has secured the future and development of the fishing industry there, and the£8 million investment in Technium CAST at Parc Menai in Bangor, which has ensured the continuation of the successful partnership between businesses and the university of Wales, Bangor. That has secured safe jobs in my constituency.

Hywel Williams: What discussions has the Secretary of State had with the Treasury regarding the cutting of Revenue jobs in the objective 1 areas at the same time as jobs are being created? The Government are destroying well paid jobs in Porthmadog and in other constituencies neighbouring mine. Has the Secretary of State done anything about this, or has he just let the Treasury get on with it?

David Jones: The Minister has mentioned the successes of the objective 1 project, but I am sure that he will be aware of figures obtained from the Welsh Assembly Government only last week indicating that, with just one month of objective 1 to go, only 58,500 of the 96,400 jobs promised for west Wales and the valleys—61 per cent.—have been created to date. Does he agree that part of the problem isthe Welsh Assembly Government's over-centralised approach and tendency to micro-manage projects? Will he urge his colleagues in Cardiff bay to allow more decisions on the application of convergence funding in future to be made at local level, with the full participation of local authorities?

Nick Ainger: In relation to the success of the project and reaching the job creation target, I would challenge the hon. Gentleman's comments. He said that the objective 1 programme has only a month or two to go. In fact, the objective 1 programme will not finish until 2008, as there is a two-year time lag. The jobs target is ambitious, but let us be honest—we needed an ambitious target, bearing in mind the economy that the Tory Government left to Wales in 1997. While there will be those who pick particular areas and say that they have not been a success, he must recognise that the objective 1 programme has been a resounding success overall. Unemployment is down dramatically, employment is up significantly and earnings are also up significantly. We see massive progress throughout Wales—

Owen Paterson: Two days ago, I took the hon. Member for Wrexham(Ian Lucas)—and I echo the Secretary of State's congratulations on landing the money—to see the Under-Secretary of State for Transport, the hon. Member for Glasgow, South (Mr. Harris), to discuss the Wrexham-Shropshire-Marylebone railway project, which is an open access agreement. That project was planned to start next June and is now drifting because of bureaucratic delays. Will the Secretary of State undertake to work closely with the Department for Transport in Marsham street to ensure that the project stays on track, as it will be of huge benefit to those on both sides of the border?

Peter Hain: I thank the hon. Gentleman for his best wishes to my wife, which I will certainly pass on to her.
	In the light of the Government of Wales Act it is important for us to modify the protocols, particularly devolution guidance notes. They must be a matter between the Welsh Assembly and United Kingdom Governments, not between the Assembly and the House of Commons of Parliament as a whole, but there is no doubt that action is needed. I told the Assembly yesterday that we should establish a presumption in favour of granting it extra powers unless the principle or scope of the request is clearly wrong—for instance, if it covers a non-devolved matter.

Cheryl Gillan: I associate myself with the remarks of the hon. Member for Meirionnydd Nant Conwy (Mr. Llwyd) about Elizabeth; Conservative Members also wish her well. I also thank the boys for welcoming me back. I obviously need to be back at the Dispatch Box to rebut the rubbish that the Secretary of State talks about Tory policies both in this House and the Welsh Assembly. Can the Secretary of State clarify whether under the new Act an Order in Council—a request for legislation made by the Welsh Assembly Government—can be amended or refused by any of the following: the Welsh Grand Committee, the House of Lords, this House or himself?

Nick Ainger: Everyone knows that whichever bid for the defence training academy is successful, it will bring in thousands of jobs. That is what my right hon. Friend was saying. Whoever wins the bid will have a superb opportunity to give a massive boost to their local economy. But it is important that the proper due process be undertaken openly and transparently, and therefore the Ministry of Defence has properly subjected the bids to a rigorous and impartial evaluation process, overseen by an independent auditor. I am confident that when the final decision is made, it will be based on merit and value for the taxpayer—and may the best bid win.

John Prescott: My right hon. Friend the Prime Minister has mentioned to the House on several occasions that he would like to encourage neighbouring countries to participate in such agreements. It is not easy: it is difficult. Some of those countries are playing a difficult role and encouraging the assaults and injuries that are taking place, and they could do much more to prevent that. If the right hon. Gentleman's discussions with those people are encouraging such developments, I am sure that we would welcome them.

David Clelland: Is my right hon. Friend aware that carers, whose earnings are limited because they have to look after people whoare elderly, disabled or terminally ill, lose all of their £46 carers allowance if their earnings rise even marginally above £84 a week? Is he further aware that the latest increase in the minimum wage has put many carers in just that position, and that those people are now thousands of pounds a year worse off? Does he agree that the minimum wage was never intended to cause that problem, and will he look into it as a matter of urgency, so that carers are given a fair deal?

Vincent Cable: I have the benefit of the Prime Minister's comments, as well as of the pithy summary by the  Daily Mirror—"Blair Raps Northern Moaners". I think that he was trying to make the more subtle point that it is the differences within regions that really matter, rather than the differences between them. On that measure, can the Deputy Prime Minister explain how income and wealth inequalities have become worse under a Labour Government than they were after17 years of Tory Government?

John Prescott: I can tell the hon. Gentleman that there are 2.5 million more people in work now, that the differential has been reduced, and that everyone is enjoying a considerably better standard of living than was the case when we came to power in 1997. The hon. Gentleman has expressed different views about these matters at different times. I have been doing some research into his record, and have discovered that both his arguments and his politics have moved about a bit. He stood for Labour in Glasgow in 1970, for the Social Democratic partyin York in 1983, and for the Liberal Democrats in Twickenham in 1992. With such nimble feet, it is no wonder that he lists ballroom dancing as a hobby.

Louise Ellman: The Prime Minister's recent statement on slavery has been widely welcomed. Will my right hon. Friend the Deputy Prime Minister support an international remembrance day for slavery and does he back thenew Liverpool slavery museum, which looks at the implications of slavery at present and in the future as well as at slavery in the past?

James Brokenshire: If he will list his official engagements for Wednesday29 November.
	Three years ago, my constituent James Wollacott contracted MRSA in hospital following successful surgery on his knee. Since then he has suffered significant problems with mobility and is in constant pain. He has had five corrective operations and will require further surgery in the new year. He is only23 years old. What assurance can the Deputy Prime Minister give him and other victims of MRSA that combating hospital-acquired infections will not be compromised by the current financial pressures in the national health service?

John Prescott: The Government's record on the NHS is very good and is there for all to see. We should be proud of the amount of resources we have put into the NHS. We created the NHS and we have sustained it. Every time we try to bring in resources to make improvements, it is always opposed by the Conservatives. Make no mistake about it: we will proudly defend the NHS. It is our creation. Millions of people in this country are totally dependent on it and we shall continue to provide a high quality national health service.

John Prescott: I thank my hon. Friend for his kind remarks, but I have to say that when I was at this Dispatch Box nearly 10 years ago talking about Kyoto and the environment, we got no support whatever from the Opposition. This country led the way on climate change and the Kyoto agreement and in those negotiations, and it is the only country, apart from Sweden, to more than achieve its Kyoto targets.
	We are now on the second stage. The Stern report points the way forward. The local authorities are extremely important in that and we will see that they have the resources and the back-up to make the changes necessary to bring about the climate change that we all know is required. We will be consistent in our policy—unlike the sudden change that we find now among the Opposition, who have discovered climate change 10 years too late.

John Leech: As we approach the end of lung cancer awareness month, will the Deputy Prime Minister commit the Government to support urgent research into the value of lung cancer screening which is looking very promising in major research in the USA, so that we are equipped to deliver a national lung cancer screening programme once the techniques are fully appraised?

William Hague: He is going to have to wait for the third for that. Why does the taxpayer spend £2 million a year keeping the right hon. Gentleman in what one of his colleagues calls a non-job when he cannot even answer a simple question at the Dispatch Box? There should be a number in that folder for the biggest destruction of savings by any Government in the history of this country. Surely he knows the figure for how much the pension funds have been robbed by the Chancellor. So let us ask him again: what is the figure, including all the interest and dividends that they would have earned in the meantime?

Gordon Prentice: Has my friend had the opportunity to read early-day motion 327 on the Government's consultation on Trident? Will he give an undertaking, as Deputy Prime and deputy leader, that he will use his best offices to persuade the national executive committee to consult Labour party members and publish the results—

John Prescott: I note the point made by the hon. Gentleman. I think that £5 million has been raised so far and further calls have gone out to some of the companies involved to make a greater contribution. I understand that the debt is in the region of£35 million, which is an awful lot of money. I hope that the inquiry that is being conducted by the DTI will give us some idea of how we can avoid such a thing in the future. I will certainly pass on the hon. Gentleman's remarks about whether the Government can give any more in such circumstances.

Mike O'Brien: In just a moment.
	Fraud takes many forms. It can be complex—international fraud, involving vast sums of money, can be committed by bankers, accountants, con men and even lawyers. The evidence can run to thousands of documents. Alternatively, the fraud can be of a smaller scale—benefit fraud is an obvious example. Our criminal justice system prosecutes benefit and minor fraud with efficiency, but it has found it more difficult to prosecute complex and serious white-collar fraud. Complex cases can last a year or more. Although the success of the Serious Fraud Office means that convictions are secured, contested trials can be long-drawn-out and difficult.

Mike O'Brien: Complex and serious fraud cases have been a particular problem in the courts for a long time. Murder cases, by and large, can be resolved relatively quickly and the issues are often very straightforward. Complex and serious fraud cases are an entirely different matter, with cases lasting forsix months, a year or more, having multiple defendants and involving the discussion of complex issues. We want to ensure that we tackle those issues in a sensible and straightforward way.

Mike O'Brien: First, the measure is not the first foot in the door, as the hon. Gentleman put it—far from it—and it is not a general attack; that is complete nonsense. However, he is right to say that it will affect only a small number of cases. The figure is variously estimated, but it is certainly put at fewer than 20. The Serious Fraud Office considered the number of cases over the past five years that lasted longer than six months and, of those 26 cases, only about six lasted more than a year. It believes that, under its way of handling the issue, about six cases a year would probably be affected by the measure. I do not want to be tied to a particular figure because, as he knows well, in the end it will be a decision for the Lord Chief Justice and those making the decision in individual cases. However, our estimate is that the number will be between half a dozen—that is the more likely figure—and 15 to 20 cases.

Mike O'Brien: May I just answer the question posed by the hon. Member for Beaconsfield? I shall then give way to some others. We want to ensure that 99.9 per cent., or 48,000, cases tried in the Crown court will continue to be tried by a jury. The number of cases affected by the change will be tiny, compared with the 48,000 contested cases that are tried before juries in the Crown court each year. It is worth making that point.

Mike O'Brien: Will the hon. Gentleman bear with me while I reply to my hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle-under-Lyme (Paul Farrelly)? Let us calm down the vibrations and not become too excited, as we have discussed these issues before. They are important, and it is right that we consider the arguments calmly and carefully.
	The view taken by judges in a series of cases is that the issue must be addressed, which is why the Government introduced the proposals. When the Blue Arrow case was under way, the trial judge, Mr. Justice McKinnon, had to sever the case into two trials to make it "manageable for the jury". He said that
	"no jury should be asked to cope with what this jury had had to endure."
	The Court of Appeal said that
	"there is a significant risk of a miscarriage of justice resulting from the volume and complexity of the evidence".
	It noted that the jury retired with 956 pages of exhibits and such recollections as they may have had of the evidence given by 94 prosecution witnesses seven to11 months earlier, and of the final speeches of counsel, which were delivered 59 to 65 days earlier. As a result of that long deliberation, in 2003 the House passed section 43 of the Criminal Justice Act.

Dominic Grieve: May I touch on the point about specimen counts? As a result of the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004, it is possible to hold a trial of specimen counts by jury, and a trial of remaining counts by the judge alone. The Government do not appear to have taken that into account in introducing the proposals, so I would be grateful if the Solicitor-General dealt the issue.

Mike O'Brien: There has been discussion of the change over a long period, involving submissions to Lord Justice Auld and, before that, to Lord Roskill, and also submissions in response to White Papersthat have been published. The various professionsand members of the public have therefore had opportunities to express their view over a long period. There was a long consultation before the 2003 Act. Since the order was passed by the House but not proceeded with in another place, there have been discussions with the Front-Bench teams of the other parties to see whether there was a possibility of compromise that would enable us to proceed with what we believe to be a necessary proposal. We were unable to secure that level of agreement, which is why we are where we are.

Mike O'Brien: To some extent, we will have to rely on the good offices of the person appointed as Lord Chief Justice, and I think that we can do that. We do not envisage an oral hearing. The aim would be for the Lord Chief Justice to look at the facts of the case and take a view, bearing in mind the view of the judge who heard the initial application, which can take place with submissions by the various parties. The Lord Chief Justice will then have to give his consent to the process. That is a strong safeguard to ensure thatthe procedure will take place only in cases that fit the criteria and in which a jury is not necessary.

Mike O'Brien: The House has considered the matter since 2003 and taken a view on it, as it did only a few months ago. As regards evidence, the hon. Gentleman mentioned the Jubilee line case. He is right to say that the jurors said that they understood the evidence in that case. It is not our argument that jurors are incapable of doing that. It is our view, however, that the report on the Jubilee line case makes it clear that both during the trial and subsequently, a number of jurors suffered considerable stresses as a result of being involved in such a long and complex case. The employment of some of them was affected, and some experienced difficult circumstances since then.
	Although it is not clear that the Jubilee line case would ever have met the criteria for section 43—that is the view that the inspector reached—the stresses on the jurors were considerable. With the report of the inspector on the case, we had a great opportunity to see what happens in such cases. Obviously, a jury cannot be questioned during the course of a case which has come to a result. That one did not, so the inspectorate was able to ask the jurors what happened and how they felt it progressed. That does not provide evidence that such a case would necessarily fit the criteria of section 43, which the inspector doubted, but it tells us that the stresses on a juror can be substantial not only during a case, but subsequently.

Mike O'Brien: I will give way to my hon. and learned Friend later, but I need to make some progress.
	Our criminal justice system needs to deal effectively and fairly with all kinds of crime, but sometimes itfails to do so in the most serious and complicated frauds because defendants do not face trial on charges that adequately reflect the full criminality of the accusations that are made against them. That is the key point. From time to time, trials collapse under the pressure of evidence, with the result that justice is not done and the taxpayer is left to meet substantial costs. The current position is that the greater the scale and complexity of the fraud, the less likely it is to result in a successful prosecution. That cannot be right. We cannot accept a double standard whereby petty frauds are easy to prosecute and frauds on a grand scale which, although small in number, can have an impact on many victims are too difficult to prosecute. Despite attempts to keep trials within reasonable bounds, complex fraud cases often last for many months. In the four years from 2002 to 2005, the Serious Fraud Office reported that 26 fraud trials lasted for more than six months, six of which lasted for more than a year.
	The prosecution and the courts already do much to keep the length of trials to a minimum. We welcome the Lord Chief Justice's protocol of March 2005, which will promote robust and well-informed case management. That will help, but it is not an adequate answer of itself. The complexity and potential length of some serious and complex fraud trials still resists the best efforts of all involved to reduce the burden on the jury. In order to make them manageable, trials are too often carved up in a way that prevents the full criminality of the fraud from being exposed in the trial. That cannot serve the interests of justice. Cases are split into separate trials by the severing of indictments. Even then, it is sometimes necessary to restrict the material put before the court, in order to make it manageable and comprehensible to a jury. Evidence is pared down and charges reduced to the main charges. Secondary defendants, who should perhaps be prosecuted notwithstanding, are not brought to justice because it would complicate the trial too much. The result can still be the worst of all worlds—enormously long trials that are intolerable for the unfortunate jurors, but do not enable the full criminality alleged in the most serious fraud cases to be presented to the court.

Mike O'Brien: No.
	The Government's proposal for judges to try cases without a jury is not a general attack on jury trials—on the contrary. As I said, there were 28,000 trials before a jury in the course of the past year. The provision will affect a few trials each year; 99.9 per cent. of jury trials will be unaffected. Furthermore, the Government are looking to take steps to examine the issue of Diplock courts in Northern Ireland. If we can do that, there will more jury trials than ever. In fact, I am a great believer in jury trials; I was a criminal lawyer before I came here. They are a good way of deciding guilt or innocence in the Crown court.
	That said, the vast majority of trials take place in magistrates courts and do not involve a jury, so there is no immutable principle that we must always have a jury to do justice. Every day, in criminal courts across the country, people elect in either-way cases to allow district judges—judges sitting alone—to decide guilt or innocence in trials. If we went down to Horseferry road magistrates court or to other London courts today, we could well see that happening. It often happens, although not in summary-only cases, with the consent of the accused. No one should argue that justice is not being done because no jury is present. Many of these cases result in people going to prison. Thousands of people are tried in this way every year. Someone who gets arrested for benefit fraud and charged with a deception can be tried by a judge sitting alone, so it surely cannot be said that a senior judge sitting alone could not do justice in the case of someone arrested for a serious white collar crime.
	Is the argument that having a jury is a great principle only if it happens in a particular kind of court—the Crown court? Either that is a principle or it is not. Daily in this country, justice is delivered in trials before district judges or before a single judge in our civil courts. In our view, a High Court judge can do justice for that very small number of white collar fraudsters. Juries are right for some cases, but not for every case. The real issue is how we can best do justice. Where justice can be delivered in a better way, we should act on that. Our argument is that in a few cases a year out of the 48,000—only in the most serious and complex fraud cases—there are good reasons for saying that justice can be done by a judge sitting alone.

Mike O'Brien: There are two key issues. First, this area has a long history, whereas others do not, and we do not intend to move into those. Secondly, some of these cases involve very complex evidence having to be presented to the jurors. The jurors on fraud cases sometimes face the physical and mental task of listening to complex and obscure evidence involving a large number of defendants making interlinked financial transactions over a number of years, with detailed cross-examination— [ Interruption.] I am trying to answer the point raised by the hon. and learned Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier), but if he insists on chuntering on, he is not going to hear me. Either he is serious about making this point, in which case he will listen to the answer, or he is not.

Mike O'Brien: No. Perhaps I can answer the hon. and learned Gentleman's question, then he can intervene if he really wants to. Let us have a sensible discussion, rather than heckling from the sidelines.
	Jurors often have to listen to somewhat complex, obscure evidence involving a large number of defendants making interlinked financial transactions over a number of years, with detailed cross-examination requiring constant cross-referencing to documents and records. Many of the complex deals and financial transactions that can be involved in serious and complex fraud cases will be outside the experience of members of the public, facing jurors with a steep learning curve to master the financial theory as well as the practical evidence.

Dominic Grieve: I cannot think of a reason why we should not. Indeed, if anyone asks for my view, I shall say that we should. I hope that gives some indication of my thinking on the matter. It is true that stand-alone legislation can be removed from the statute book fairly easily.
	The Solicitor-General comes to the Dispatch Box with all sorts of honeyed assurances that we should not consider the Bill to be part of a general attack on the jury system. The history of the past 10 years suggests, however, that the system has come under repeated attack from the Government, that on numerous occasions we have had to stand up to the Government's attack—not always with complete success—and that there has been a progressive erosion that goes beyond that of the jury system.
	The Solicitor-General mentioned district judges in magistrates courts. I am a firm believer in district judges in magistrates courts—a deputy district judge who sits in magistrates courts is sitting behind me now—but there is no doubt that, over the past 10 years, the Government have shown themselves to be highly inimical to the lay magistracy. Indeed, they wanted to reduce its work to nothing more than road traffic cases until the cost was revealed.
	In summary jurisdiction courts, lay magistrates perform exactly the same role of representing the community independently as juries, and the Government do not like juries. If they did, it would be inexplicable that they proposed in the Bill that became the Criminal Justice Act 2003—until we stopped them—to allow people to elect for trial by judge alone if they were so minded. We had to oppose that proposal, and it was in the final stand-off that we ended up with a double-lock mechanism in section 43. I must tell the Solicitor-General that I had no doubt—and I am sure the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes) had no doubt—that that was a face-saving device, because we had told the Government in the clearest and most unequivocal terms that in no circumstances, either here or in the other place, would any of the Opposition parties vote to allow the implementation of the proposal. To suggest otherwise is a rewriting of history that causes me even more anxiety when I consider it.
	The right hon. Member for Leicester, East (Keith Vaz) mentioned consultation. The Government promised consultation after the 2003 Act: it took the form of a morning seminar, with none of those invited realising that it was the only formal consultation. I could not attend, but my noble Friend Lord Kingsland went along, and was not aware even while attending the seminar that it was in fact the formal consultation. I think the Solicitor-General would have to confirm that there has been no further formal consultation whatever since then—certainly I am not aware of any.
	I acknowledge, and place on record, that on a number of occasions I have met the Attorney-General, and indeed the Solicitor-General, for amiable discussions about possible ways of changing the current jury system in fraud trials. However, none of the suggestions made by me or by the hon. Member for Southwark and Bermondsey was accepted, and it was clear that there was no meeting of minds.
	We should ask ourselves what the Bill is really trying to do. I always listen carefully to the Solicitor-General, but I have to say that the first thing I look at when the Government propose legislation is the Home Office propaganda statement released to the press, in which the form of words and the nuances are often rather different.
	This Home Office statement begins with a little preamble about the new legislation. It states
	"The Government is committed to rebalancing the criminal justice system in favour of ... the law-abiding majority."
	How often have we heard that statement used in the House to justify authoritarian, draconian, unfair measures to interfere with the criminal justice system, without there being a shred of evidence that they will rebalance the system in favour of the law-abiding majority?
	Apart from anything else, I think the Solicitor-General must accept that if he is telling us the truth, the impact of his proposals on criminality in the United Kingdom will be so minimal as to go totally unnoticed. I believe that 99.9 per cent. of trials will still take place before juries, with possibly half a dozen a year taking place without them. If this is really the Government's answer to how we are to reduce crime and the fear of crime in our country, they are going about it in a very strange way.

Dominic Grieve: My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Delay in any criminal justice process is a bad thing, and I know—not so much from working on fraud cases, but from working on health and safety cases, including prosecuting them—that cases take far too long to get to court. One would like them to go faster.
	Delay is sometimes due to the investigation process. I do not think that it is usually due to the lawyers, but bringing everybody together in a court requires a bit of organisation, and it will still require organisation even when there is not a jury. There are always plenty of people to make up the jury panel—they can be found without great difficulty—and co-ordinating the diary availability of lawyers, defendants, witnesses and judges is by far the more complicated and time-consuming process in bringing a case to court. That is where the delays arise.
	The Home Office propaganda statement goes on to say:
	"At present, in some of the most serious and complicated fraud cases, it is not possible for defendants to be tried on charges that adequately reflect the full scale of the accusations against them. This is because in cases that involve a multitude of different offences and defendants, it is necessary to limit the amount of evidence that is put before a jury."
	When I started prosecuting, I was taught by those who knew much more about the subject than I did to keep it simple. Every judge in front of whom I ever appeared insisted, when prosecutors said they wanted an 18-count indictment—for fraud or anything else—"No, cut it down. The criminality can be adequately shown by far fewer counts." In my experience, at the end of cases that resulted in a conviction, other matters could often be taken into consideration with the consent of the defendant. Under the Domestic Violence, Crime and VictimsAct 2004, where defendants do not agree to matters being taken into consideration, the judge may reach a decision on his own. I am at a loss, therefore, to understand how the Solicitor-General can argue that there is a problem of not showing full criminality, as we have all these important new provisions on the statute book—although I have a funny feeling that the relevant section of the 2004 Act has not yet been implemented, which is characteristic of this Government.
	We must also have a sense of perspective. I am sure that there are many people who have committed all sorts of crimes—not just fraud—for which they have never been convicted. I am not particularly concerned about that if they are serving a long period of imprisonment for the crimes for which they have been convicted, and neither I suspect are the public. The truth is that in many cases people are convicted of specimen counts, and it is perfectly adequate for the sentencing that follows to reflect the overall criminality. The Solicitor-General simply did not touch on that in his remarks, which puzzled me very much.

Paul Farrelly: The hon. Gentleman is making some very reasonable points about case management—not for nothing does "Private Eye" call the prosecutor "the serious farce office"—but he is wrong to imply that the Government have picked this Bill out of a hat. As has been said before, it is based on the Roskill recommendations, which are 20 years old. I hope that it will be part of a package of measures—including a serious attempt to address plea-bargaining—that the Government will roll out in the next few months. I should be interested to hear the hon. Gentleman's arguments on plea-bargaining. At the moment, there is very little incentive for serious fraudsters or insider dealers to cop a plea bargain, because they think that they will be able to bamboozle the jury and get off. If the Bill gives some incentive for such people to cop a plea bargain, because of the prospect of appearing before an expert judge, all the better for the more serious and effective prosecution of fraud and insider dealing.

Dominic Grieve: I agree entirely with the hon. and learned Gentleman and that brings me to my point about procedure. We will be asking judges to deal with long and complex cases and make decisions at the end based not on the balance of probabilities—the civil test—but on whether they are sure that a person is guilty of an offence. That raises problems with which judges should not be saddled. Indeed, I was surprised when the Solicitor-General suggested that the judiciary favoured this change. I have not come across a single judge, especially among the Crown Court judges, who think that it is necessary. Indeed, many have said privately, in vociferous terms, that they are against it. The last thing that High Court judges want is to have their credibility damaged when they reach difficult conclusions of fact. If they say that they are sure that certain events happened, three years later a new witness might emerge—which sometimes happens—who calls their judgment about what went on into question. It does not help the reputation of the judiciary who, in the criminal justice division, are the arbiters of fairness, not the deciders of fact. I know that we cast judges in that role in Diplock courts, but that was for exceptional reasons, and it is not in their interests to extend the practice.

Dominic Grieve: I am not sure whether that was left out of the Solicitor-General's speech or was to form part of the concluding remarks, but I disagree with it. Juries are capable of understanding complex evidence. Because of the random nature of their selection they mutually reinforce and even out disparities of education. In my experience, the evidence is overwhelming that they can return true verdicts according to the evidence and ensure fairness towards those who are accused, quite apart from taking into account the wider need to suppress crime in our society.
	We have not heard about the procedure. Judges who are trying these cases will be judges of both law and fact. They will have material placed before them for their consideration that they may subsequently haveto rule out of the evidence. They will receive representations and submissions in the course of the trial that jurors would not normally hear, and they will have to handle all those complexities in the course of the trial process. That is not a slight issue, and I am a little puzzled that the Solicitor-General has not provided us with greater detail about how the system would work in practice. I suspect that it will be time consuming and, indeed, he has already conceded that time-saving is not part of the picture. If that is the case, it brings me back to the Government's propaganda document, which states:
	"At times these trials collapse, wasting millions of pounds and failing to ensure justice for victims."
	I repeat, what has that got to do with juries?
	I always listen carefully to the Solicitor-General and the Attorney-General, but there is a big difference between what the Law Officers say and what the Government's Home Office propaganda department churns out for the benefit of the press. That is why the House should be so wary of these proposals. I do not know where the force behind them comes from, but the evidence has been overwhelming in the past 10 years that this Government do not like juries or our present criminal justice system; believe in forms of parallel administrative justice; and are ready to cut corners with our civil liberties and the rights of defendants in order to achieve what they believe to be socially desirable objectives. The risk that the House runs is that supporting this measure will not reduce crime—which we should prioritise—but will undermine the criminal justice system and confidence in it. We would also open the door to getting rid of the jury system that, I and many other hon. Members profoundly believe, is one of the absolute underpinnings of our civil liberties. On that basis, there is no possibility of our supporting the measure and we will vote against it.

Robert Marshall-Andrews: I shall endeavour to be brief. The last time that I said that at the beginning of a speech, they were the only words that I uttered before being stopped. I shall take a little longer on this occasion, although this awful Bill deserves short shrift.
	The Bill is a serious attack on civil liberties, which have been our heritage for 800 years. It is unnecessary, unworkable and ill-conceived. If it is ever passed into law, it will almost certainly offend the European convention. It will lead to a two-tier system of white collar judges trying white collar criminals. It will involve huge delay in the trying of cases and massive extra expenditure, and it risks bringing the judicial system into disrepute. Apart from that, it is fine.

Robert Marshall-Andrews: If the hon. Gentleman waits a moment, I shall deal with that as I develop my argument.
	I shall start with a generality. The Bill does not stand on its own. From their inception in 1997, the Government have shown a clear aversion to the principle of jury trial. The Criminal Justice Act 2003 made it possible to bring past offences into any court to judge a defendant's mala fides or mens rea. We can do it in this case—this Government have serious form when it comes to attacking jury trial.
	As has been noted, those attacks began way back with the Criminal Justice (Mode of Trial) Bill. That was introduced in 1999, barely two years after the Government came to power. Effectively, it was an attempt to abolish the right to elect trial by jury, and there lies a bitter irony. The Home Secretary of the time, now the Leader of the House, told us that we had no need to fear as the provision would be applied only to minor, either-way offences. Serious fraud or crimes of violence would be left untouched, he said, but now the dog is being attacked from another end.
	No doubt the Solicitor-General believes that he is speaking the truth when he states that the Government are not bent on the destruction of the jury trial system, but his assertions give us little confidence. Indeed, I can remember the then Home Secretary telling the House that the mode of trial Bill enjoyed the support of the Lord Chief Justice. In fact, it emphatically did not enjoy his support: subsequently, I discovered that the Lord Chief Justice had written to the Home Secretary four days before that statement was made to the House to say that he had grave reservations about the Bill and that he thought that it would lead to considerable injustice.
	That causes one to have less than entire confidence in a Government who say that the judiciary are in favour of the Bill. I can tell the House that judges are profoundly against it. They have said repeatedly—in private, although many have spoken in public—that they consider the Bill to be unnecessary and unworkable.

Robert Marshall-Andrews: There is much in what the hon. and learned Gentleman says. The Government's approach has caused serious problems in the courts, given the uncertainty about which parts of the body of legislation are in force, when they came into force and how much is retrospective. However, I do not want to stray too far from the locus in quo, so I shall return to dealing with the indictment with which I began what is going to be a relatively short speech.
	The Solicitor-General was quite right to correct me over a slip of the tongue that I made about the statistical basis of jury trials. Juries do not convict in 85 per cent. of cases but, under the jury system, 85 per cent. of serious fraud cases do result in conviction. That conviction rate is higher than for any other criminal activity. I can give chapter and verse for that statement, but we should not get involved in a barren argument about statistics. The plain fact is that juries understand serious fraud very well.
	I should declare an interest, in that I have done many serious fraud cases in my time at the Bar. No one in my position has ever had the slightest doubt that juries understand such cases. The financial dealings are sometimes complex, but there is almost never any doubt about whether a fraud has been committed, only about who did it. Juries are far and away better than anyone else at deciding that relatively simple matter at the end of a trial.
	Do we have a problem recruiting juries? No, we do not. The panel of jurors is rather larger at the beginning, and the people who are selected are the ones who are comfortable with sitting for between, say, 12 to 26 weeks to deal with a case. Are they unrepresentative? No, they are not. It is true that we lose a number of people whose jobs preclude them from working on a jury over such a period if time. As a result, some classes of people—disabled people, women, those who have taken early retirement or are temporarily unemployed, for example—are slightly over represented, but are this, of all Governments, going to suggest that such juries are incapable of trying serious fraud cases or that their involvement is undesirable? The proportion of cases in which juries convict demonstrates that they are perfectly capable of coming to a decision.
	In passing, I want to mention the Jubilee line case, which was cursed from the start by poor case management. Matters that should have been dealt with before a jury was ever empanelled were dealt with only afterwards. As a result, the trial became completely unmanageable and in the end collapsed. Reference has been made to the subsequent inquiry, and the resulting document is a luminous illustration of the seriousness and brilliance with which juries attach themselves to their work.
	The jury in the Jubilee line case had nothing to do with the trial's collapse. Indeed, it could well be said that it was an early example of trial by judge alone. The jury had hardly anything to do with it: the case was tried by the judge alone, and the result was a complete disaster. Our adversarial system is wholly incapable of dealing with trial by judge alone. To suggest, as the previous Home Secretary once did, that removing the jury creates an inquisitorial system is the precise equivalent of removing the wheels from a car and claiming that one has invented a boat. The system is incapable of dealing with a judge being the arbiter of fact.
	I hope that the Solicitor-General will accept the line that I am about to toss to him and intervene to assist me. I want to ask a question about public interest immunity that I could not put to him while he was making his speech, as I did not want to delay progress in the debate. In the vast majority of serious cases there are important issues of public interest immunity, which our system deals with by means of the prosecution talking to the judge and deciding what evidence should be given to the defence, and what should not. The judge can make that decision because—and this has been confirmed by Europe—he is not the judge of fact. However, a judge who determines PII applications and is then a judge of fact will be in possession of material that he will share with the prosecution, but of which the defence will have no knowledge at all. In those circumstances a conviction would last for about 10 minutes in a European Court before it was overturned—

Robert Marshall-Andrews: I was hoping to have an answer, but unhappily I did not; or rather, it was an attempt at an answer but, as the Solicitor-General knows, it was entirely deficient. I shall take it piece by piece. PII happens in almost every serious fraud case that is tried—certainly in my experience—so that is the end of that argument.
	The second argument is that a single judge can hear PII applications, but the European Court has already said that the only reason it endorses PII applications made to a single judge is because he is not the judge of fact. The minute he is a judge of fact, it will, ipso facto, offend before the European Court. For a secondary judge to sit alongside another judge dealing with PII applications would be reinventing the wheel, with one judge sitting as jury and the other as a judge. Furthermore, it is necessary that PII cases are kept permanently under review by the judge trying the case.
	Finally, I do not want to give the Solicitor-General a long lecture on the inquisitorial system, the Napoleonic and other codes and how they differ from an adversarial system, because we would be here for a considerable time. However, the checks and safeguards in an inquisitorial system are wholly absent from our adversarial system, which relies on a jury to provide them.

Robert Marshall-Andrews: I am sorry, but I do not entirely understand that intervention. Is the argument that we are dealing with the Judicature Acts—that in civil cases judges sit alone? If it is seriously argued in respect of the liberty of the subject that in criminal cases involving imprisonment and the removal of liberty we can move to a civil judicial system—[ Interruption.]

Robert Marshall-Andrews: With great respect, I have to point out that the Solicitor-General does not listen to what I say, if he suggests that I am saying that as the result of the Bill, we would have corrupt judges. I said that one of the reasons why criminal judges rightly, and uniquely, maintain a reputation for being incorruptible is the existence of the jury system. It has always been implicit in our law and legal learning that one of the advantages of a jury system is that it acts as a buffer between the citizen and the judge. That is one of the reasons why it has been possible to maintain over centuries—not weeks or months—a reputation for a rigorously and ruthlessly incorruptible judiciary. I hope that the Solicitor-General now understands the point I was making. It is not a new point; it has been made for centuries and is one of the reasons for the existence of jury trial.
	May I now deal with the erosion argument? The Solicitor-General has given me little confidence that the measure is not part of a general erosion. One of the reasons for that—to pick up a point made by the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve)—is the repetition of the fact that nothing implicit in fraud or juries makes the Bill necessary. What makes it necessary, as has been repeated time and again, is the length of time that a trial will take. And as the hon. Gentleman points out, it is not simply fraud cases that take longer than the two weeks of jury trial. I suppose, but I do not have statistical evidence for it, that the average length of a murder case in the Old Bailey is six weeks. That is not because it is complex; it is because often there are several defendants to try. That is one reason why fraud cases take a considerable time—not because they are complex, but because often there are quite a few defendants to try. And if it takes 12 weeks to try six defendants, it is two weeks per defendant. That is why such cases last as long as they do.
	If there is going to be an ex cathedra statement that juries as a matter of fact should not be put to the inconvenience of sitting for more than six weeks on any trial, we are into the borderland and the hinterland of very many other cases in addition to fraud cases. Ifthat is what is motivating the Government—and it is what the Solicitor-General says is motivating the Government—we are not simply on a slippery slope, we are on a glacial path towards the Government bringing forward legislation in respect of terrorism, in respect of long murder trials, and in respect of all trials anticipated to last for more than six weeks, all to be tried for three weeks by judge alone, with all the difficulties and problems that are implicit in that.

Edward Garnier: Of course, the Solicitor-General said it in terms. He said:
	"We have no intention at this stage".
	It is not just, "We have no intention"; it is
	"no intention at this stage",
	so we need to be very careful about the Government's promises.

Simon Hughes: Like the hon. and learned Member for Medway (Mr. Marshall-Andrews) and the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve), some of us have well and truly been here before. The arguments of both were as robust as those that they made previously, and the same will be true of mine.
	This is the fifth round of this fight. The first and second rounds were fought on the Criminal Justice (Mode of Trial) Bill and the Criminal Justice (Modeof Trial) (No. 2) Bill in the previous Labour Administration; the third was fought in relation to the Criminal Justice Act 2003; and the fourth was a year ago, when the Government attempted to get into law an order under the Criminal Justice Act 2003.
	I note that the issue frequently comes around in November. I also note, with satisfaction, that the Government in the end do not get their way, and I anticipate that it will be the same in relation to this Bill. Even if we do not manage to defeat it today, or on Third Reading in this place after it has come back from Committee, I do not imagine that it will have any better chance of getting through the House of Lords than similar proposals have over the past six years. Not only are the arguments weak, and not only is this—as we have all agreed so far, apart from the Solicitor-General—an attempt to undermine one of the fundamental and successful pillars of the British justice system, but the arguments in favour of this proposal have weakened further since the Government started down this road in 1979.

Simon Hughes: No—that we have started looking at the pieces of legislation that we would wish to be repealed, and if this legislation were enacted we would vote for its repeal in the next Parliament, when we would hope that there would be a majority for its repeal. The Government need to know that they will take the time of Parliament to pass something that will not get through this year, would only get through next year by use of the Parliament Acts, and is then likelyto have an extremely short duration, even if the Government are still in office by the time the Parliament Acts could be implemented. I am very clear about that. It is not pique; it is not theology. It is evidence, it is principle, and it is argument on the merits of the case.
	The one merit of the Bill, compared with the other three, is that at least it is what it says on the tin. It says that it is the Fraud (Trials without a Jury) Bill. The Government are not hiding their light under a bushel; they are saying what they want, and it is on that basis that my Liberal Democrat colleagues and I, together with many other Opposition Members—and, I hope, a considerable number of Labour Members—will oppose it both today and later.
	I shall try not to make points identical to those that others have made, although there is a huge amount of common ground. I want to make the preliminary point that this is part of an approach towards government that I fundamentally object to. The idea built up over the years and centuries that lay members of the public participate as serious players in the criminal justice system—an idea that is hugely important in the law of England, Wales and Northern Ireland—is being undermined. There are three elements in that.
	The first is that this is a repeated serious attempt to take lay people, not professionals, out of the process of deciding guilt and innocence in serious cases. The second, rightly mentioned by the hon. Member for Beaconsfield, is the movement—almost without announcement—to replace lay justices by paid professionals. More people are spotting this, and viewing it with increasing anger and frustration. The benefit of lay justice is that people who do other things and are properly representative of the community spend some of their time judging people in their community for lesser offences in the community. Increasingly we are seeing district judges—the old stipendiary magistrates—paid to do that job. It is a significant transition, about which many people are uncomfortable.
	The third element is the movement towards removing lay people from the criminal justice system altogether by offering more and more opportunities for people to buy their way out of justice through the fixed penalty notice system, whereby people never appear before a court at all. That may be entirely acceptable for someone who parks on a yellow line, which is an administrative matter that can be visibly dealt with, and for which guilt or innocence is difficult to dispute. It is wholly different from deciding whether someone has been assaulted in a scuffle on a Friday night outside the local pub. That is the background.
	May I make the obvious observation that I hope that everyone would expect us all to make? Nobody in the House underestimates the importance and seriousness of fraud and no one wants serious fraudsters to go free. We all acknowledge the importance of the work of the Serious Fraud Office, the Crown Prosecution Service and the police service in bringing people who commit serious fraud to justice. It is every bit as important, if not more so, than dealing with those who commit smaller frauds. Serious damage can be done to individuals and their lives by those fraudsters, and we want to bring them to book.
	One interesting aspect of today's debate is that we have had an opportunity to look at what has happened since the Criminal Justice Act 2003 was introduced and assess whether this remains as valid a proposition for the Government to advance. I have a simple set of tests as to whether we need to return to this territory, and I am led to the clear conclusion that we do not. I have not heard the Solicitor-General or any other Labour Member argue that under the present system, we have suddenly seen a great increase in acquittals and a great reduction in convictions.

Stephen Hesford: If the House had been able to implement this measure when the 2003 Act was passed, does the hon. Gentleman think that the Lord Chief Justice protocol would have been more or less necessary, if everything had been done and dusted before now?

Simon Hughes: I can understand that argument, but I do not think that the prerequisite is to move from jury to judge-only trial. I think that the prerequisite for achieving what the Solicitor-General wants is to change procedures along the lines of the changes already made. My strongest argument against the Government on the procedure is to say that we have had three years of reviewing procedures and a year and a half since the new criminal procedures were introduced and the protocol was announced by the Lord Chief Justice. We have just enacted the Fraud Act 2006, though it is not yet fully in place. As the hon. Member for Beaconsfield said, we enacted the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004—to give it its full name—in which there is a different process. There is a procedure for dealing with certain parts of someone's alleged criminality, such as severing or taking sample counts, at one stage and getting the rest dealt with later.
	It must be logical to let those changes work through the system. It must be logical to let the Fraud Act 2006 come into place. It must be logical for the Government to announce the results of the inter-governmental review, which might produce a proposal for a financial court. It would then be possible for what the Solicitor-General reasonably argues should happen to happen—for other defendants or other charges to be added to what can be presented to the court. It has never been the case that in non-fraud criminal trials, every single count has gone on the indictment. The reality, as assessed, is that many charges have been put to one side and there has been a conviction on the substantive charges. Pleas or other considerations can then either be taken into consideration or not. It is the same with serious predatory sexual offenders. They are not fully charged, in order to avoid the horror of bringing everybody to court to give evidence. One selectively charges, and convicts. That is enough to give a jury the evidence and to give the person a serious sentence at the end of it. I understand the objective, but the changes already initiated, the changes announced but not yet implemented and the changes yet to be considered will all provide that opportunity.

Stephen Hesford: I agree with the Minister, who has dealt with the point.
	The second part of my speech is about the effect of what we are doing today and the reason we are doingit. In an intervention on the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) I suggested that one reason has to do with case management. The hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey in effect adopted that point in what I consider to be an erroneous argument. However, he emphasised for me the point that the provision is part of a package for the proper prosecution of fraud cases. Nobody in the House is not fully behind the idea that what we seek, in the House and in the courts, is the fair and proper prosecution of serious fraud cases.

Simon Hughes: I have resisted intervening until now. Does not the hon. Gentleman accept that we cannot judge the effect of the changes that have already taken place in management, the changes that are not yet in place but have been agreed and the changes that have been considered but not yet announced until some years have passed and we have seen the results? It is ridiculous to suggest that we need something else when we have not had a good run at looking at the benefits of the changes already in the pipeline.

Stephen Hesford: The hon. Gentleman misapplies himself to the Government's developing agenda. If the measure comes to pass, as I sincerely hope it will, in a fraud case where the prosecution have made an application to have the matter dealt with by a single judge, the judge will have in front of him or her all the points mentioned by the hon. Gentleman—the protocol and so on—so that he or she can decide whether the case should goto a non-jury trial. If, on all the evidence, there is no reason for a case to go to a non-jury trial, it will not. As I understand the Government's case—the Minister will tell me if I am wrong—this provision is an option, not an automatic procedure. I am obliged that my hon. and learned Friend comforts me with a little nod. As with any procedure, that judgment will be subject to appeal in the Court of Appeal, which can determine whether the judge has exercised his or her jurisdiction correctly, so there is oversight. This is a way of better enabling the prosecution to manage serious cases.
	I will not repeat all the points made by the Minister, but what I find attractive is the fact that if the Bill is passed it will act as a deterrent against white-collar crime. We seek to minimise such crime and improve access to justice on such cases in our courts. My hon. and learned Friend was, for understandable reasons, slightly more circumspect than I must be, but I believe that the Bill will result in more guilty pleas. I believe that it will effect a better balance of justice than the current system. The Minister argued that more cases will be brought because those on the periphery of cases will be brought back into the picture.
	One thing that has marked the approach to crime of the Opposition and the Liberal Democrats since 1997, when I came into the House, is their lack of support, time and again, when we try to legislate to make the criminal justice system more effective on behalf of the people whom we represent. I pointed out to the hon. Member for Beaconsfield that we had crossed swords on a number of such Bills over the years. I have to say that the Conservatives' approach—not necessarily that of the hon. Gentleman—has always been one of trench warfare. We are trying to rebalance the system so that it is fair and it does the job on behalf of our constituents.
	I clearly remember that the Proceeds of CrimeAct 2002, which has toughened up the process and made it more usable in the courts, was fought at every opportunity by Opposition Members. In that case the Government were trying to get at the assets of those engaged in serious crime—which involved huge sums—and cut down on such criminality. In this case, too, we are talking about cases involving huge sums. Whether or not the Opposition intend it, the effect is the same—their so-called defence of principle is in fact a defence of those engaged in serious white-collar crime.  [Interruption.] There are groans on the Opposition Benches, but I am afraid that that is the effect. Opposition Members have to decide whether they want to prosecute those involved in serious crime. I believe that these measures will help to do so.

Mike O'Brien: My hon. Friend is quite right. There is a serious history of such proposals, and eminent judges have made reports on the matter. Since the passing of the Criminal Justice Act 2003, there has been further evidence of the importance of introducing such a measure. I referred to cases that had to be severed. In the Talbot Village Trust case, completed in 2004, the trial judge had to order the prosecution case to be reduced for management reasons. Again, in the Versailles case of 2004, which involved Cushnie and others, the judge ordered three counts against one of the defendants to be severed in the interests of trial management. Finally, in the Global Wildlife Trust case in 2005, the prosecution had to limit the size of the case.

Douglas Hogg: The hon. Member for Wirral, West (Stephen Hesford), who has just spoken for 25 minutes, reminds us of the will of Parliament. It is worth reminding him that the will of Parliament embraces the will of both Houses, not just this House. A little bit of modesty might be in place from him, because in the other place there are many hon. Members who have a great deal of experience, both of practising in the courts and of presiding over trials. We need to remember that the other place has robustly refused to pass the measure, and has made it wholly plain that it will not pass it. When we speak of the will of Parliament, let us actually face the fact: we are talking about the will of the Executive, who will rely on a three-line Whip to force through a profoundly illiberal measure. To repeat what I said to the hon. Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes), I very much hope that the other place will stand firm on the matter. If it is to be threatened with the Parliament Act, so be it. I hope that it will not pass the measure at any time, so that it will have to be forced through by the Parliament Act.
	We have been reminded from time to time that the issue has previously been addressed by reviews, and that is perfectly true. It was addressed by Lord Roskill, and by Lord Justice Auld only a few years ago. Let us remind ourselves, too, that neither review recommended the measure that is before the House. It is perfectly true that Lord Justice Auld said that there could, in serious and complicated fraud cases, be trial by a judge alone, but only when the defendant so elected. In fact, what he said was that in the generality of such cases, the trial should be by a judge alone, with a special panel of lay assessors. Incidentally, that was the view of Lord Roskill, too. Let us be wholly plain: the measure suggested today is quite beyond those advised by any expert commission. The measure was wholly rejected in discussion in the other place, and has very few friends in the Chamber today.

Douglas Hogg: I would give that proposal serious consideration, but in the end, my answer would be no. I am in favour of jury trials, and I shall come to my reasons for that later. I begin by defining the questions that I shall ask of myself and the House. My first question is whether there is anything inherent in jury trials that makes that form of trial inappropriate for complex and lengthy fraud cases. I wish to find out both whether such cases cannot be tried by a jury, and whether juries cannot try such cases. My second question is quite different: are there arguments of principle that should cause us to say that jury trial should be retained? If the answer to that is yes, I shall ask a third question: are there any practical arguments that reinforce the view that jury trials should be retained? Those are the three questions that I wish to put before the House.
	First, I wish to consider whether or not a jury is capable of properly trying a complicated fraud case or, to put it differently, whether a complicated and lengthy fraud case should not be put before a jury. I have some personal experience of the matter, although not as much as the hon. and learned Member for Medway (Mr. Marshall-Andrews). He is modest about his achievements, but there are few barristers with his experience in this field—I certainly do not presume to claim for one moment that I have such experience. His views are the fruit of years of trial practice, and they deserve serious attention. I have less experience but, in the past few years, I have taken part in two long fraud cases, both of which lasted more than 40 days, so I am familiar with the matter. In the other place, there are many Members who have much greater experience than me, and the majority of criminal practitioners, both solicitors and barristers, share my conclusions.
	Is there anything about fraud trials which means that they are not a proper subject for jury trial? The Bill asks us to consider the proposition that fraud cases are too burdensome for juries, because they are too complicated and sometimes long, so jury trials are inappropriate. The Solicitor-General shifted his ground on some issues, but he told us that he does not seek to assert that fraud trials are too complicated for juries, because they cannot manage the evidence. I share that view. Having dealt with fraud cases, I have come to the positive conclusion that juries understand full well the nature of the evidence. As my hon. Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) pointed out, in the Jubilee line case, members of the jury went out of their way in interviews to stress the fact that they were fully conversant with the evidence, notwithstanding the fact that many months had elapsed since the evidence was given.
	We can therefore start from the robust assumption that juries are perfectly capable of understanding complicated evidence. That is jolly lucky, because many other trials involve complicated evidence. Trying to understand DNA evidence is not easy. Understanding lengthy phone schedules is not easy, and neither is understanding ballistics. Studying some blood samples is not easy, yet those are things that, time and again, juries are called on to resolve. I therefore have no time for the argument that such things are too difficult for jurors. As for the length of trial, it is perfectly true that it can be a problem, but I remind the House that jurors can be excused if they can provide a good reason. In the Jubilee line trial, the jurors were ready to sign up for a six to 12-month stint. I do not accept that it is impossible to empanel a jury, or that it is too burdensome to do so.
	Questions of complexity and length are not confined to fraud cases—an issue to which I shall return. Time and again, they arise in serious crime. Terrorism and conspiracy are a case in point, as are multi-handed murders, to which the hon. and learned Member for Medway referred, and affrays. Such trials can go on for months and months. Once we accept the proposition that an excessively long trial cannot be heard by a jury, we assert a principle that will destroy our civil rights.
	Secondly, are there issues of principles that should lead us to conclude that jury trials should be retained? I am in no doubt about the matter, as I am wholly persuaded that major issues of principle are at stake. I am quite certain that public respect for law is based on the belief that at the end of the day serious trials are resolved by juries. If our liberties are taken away, we do not want them to be taken away by a single man or woman sitting alone. For many people, there is a huge gap between the defendant and the judge, who often appears to be part of the establishment or an instrument of the state who does not sympathise with ordinary people's lives. If we allow judge-only trial, a gap will open up between the citizen and the judiciary, and between the citizen and the state.
	A further unusual consideration is the perverse verdict. There are cases in which the guilt of the defendant is established beyond doubt by the overwhelming weight of evidence, yet the jury chooses to acquit. It can exercise that important safeguard for various reasons. For example, it may consider that the state is acting oppressively, as in the Ponting case. It may consider that a conviction would be wholly unfair, as in cases of mercy killing. It may consider that a trial and its consequences are disproportionate—I draw attention to road traffic legislation, and the fact that death by careless driving attracts a maximum penalty of five years. The possibility of a jury making what is technically known as a perverse verdict and refusing to convict in such cases is an important safeguard that defends the liberties of all. Arguments of principle are therefore in play.
	We should consider pragmatic arguments, too. The hon. and learned Member for Medway asked some important questions that were not resolved by the Solicitor-General. The points that he made about public interest immunity were quite correct, and there is no sensible answer to his anxieties. If he will forgive me, I will develop his argument. At the moment, in a trial by judge and jury, the judge judges the law and the jury judges the facts. In long cases, when points of admissibility arise, submissions are made to the trial judge on previous convictions, hearsay evidence, alleged confessions and so on. The judges makes a ruling on the admissibility of those issues. If he decides in favour of the defendant, the jury will never know of the previous convictions, the alleged confessions or the hearsay evidence. Once a judge sits alone, he is called on first to make that ruling. If it is adverse for the defendant, the information is taken into account. If he makes a ruling, which he may be driven to, favourable to the defendant, he still knows the previous convictions. He still knows the hearsay evidence. He still knows the alleged admissions. The trial judge will say, of course, "It will be put out of my mind", but how reassuring is that in any real sense to a defendant facing a serious charge?
	I know full well that that situation arises in tribunals. My hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr. Malins) sits as a deputy district judge and he has to come to exactly such a decision. He will forgive me if I say that the cases in which he presides do not attract verylong prison sentences. It is a problem, it has always been a problem, but it is mitigated partly because the sentences are not so long, with a right of appeal to the Crown court, and partly because in many cases there is more than one judge sitting on the tribunal—for example, lay justices. It is an inherent problem. Whether or not it infringes the European convention, now incorporated into domestic law, is a matter for another discussion, but it goes to the quality of the justice that will be administered.
	I shall make one final point and then my conclusion. Case management powers were again touched upon by the hon. and learned Member for Medway and referred to by his hon. Friend—if that is not an inappropriate word in the circumstances—the hon. Member for Wirral, West. There has been a huge change in recent years in the judicial powers of the court to regulate what can be done in trials. It is now much easier for the judge, especially when working in association with a co-operative prosecution, to ensure that indictments are not too long, that counts are carefully focused,and that the evidence is confined to that which istruly relevant. These considerations and the case management powers will help over time to deliver the objectives that many on the Government Benches seek to advance in support of the Bill.
	To conclude, I feel very strongly about the Bill. I believe that it is part of a campaign by the Government systematically to undermine the protection which the law of England has afforded its citizens for hundreds of years. When they come forward and say that it is not part of an attack on jury trial, I recall the Criminal Justice (Mode of Trial Bill and the Criminal Justice (Mode of Trial) (No. 2) Bill that we have had cause to consider. When I consider their protestations that they wish to rebalance the criminal law as between victim and defendant, I bear it in mind that many defendants are innocent people, or at least persons against whom there is not sufficient evidence. I call in mind the Criminal Justice Act 2003, many parts of which are a serious infringement of civil liberties.
	I am extremely hostile to any attempt by the Government to diminish civil and legal rights, so I am against the Bill in principle. It is not necessary, for the reasons advanced by my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Medway. Juries are perfectly capable of dealing with both complexity and length. There are issues of principle here engaged. There are arguments of pragmatism here engaged. Collectively the House should give a resounding no to the Bill. If it is forced through, as I have no doubt it will be—on a three-line Whip—by people who have not attended the arguments on the matter, the other House must stand firm. If the Government want to use the Parliament Act to pass through an authoritarian and disgraceful measure, so be it. That will be in keeping with the Government.

Humfrey Malins: The hon. Gentleman has made his contribution. I shall go no further.
	I agree wholeheartedly with two points made by the hon. and learned Member for Medway. First, we have had far too much legislation in the field of criminal law in the past few years. Judges with whom I sit and to whom I talk are baffled by the volume of legislation, most of which is intended purely to get a headline and half of which is never implemented. It gets worse by the day. Secondly, the hon. and learned Gentleman rightly pointed out that none of the judiciary see any merit in the Bill.
	The Bill is short, containing only four clauses, but it is massively important not just because of its contents, but because of what it might lead to in the jury system in future. I suppose that at first sight the Bill might not seem controversial. On the surface, the Government seem to be saying: "Some fraud trials are terribly complex and some are terribly long. Wouldn't it be simpler if in a handful of cases, perhaps only half a dozen a year—nothing to worry about—there is a provision for the trial of such a fraud case to be heard by a judge alone. Wouldn't we save a lot of time and grief?"
	On the face of it, that approach is quite alluring, but let us look a little more carefully. The Government's arguments do not stand up to proper scrutiny. My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham dealt with this very well. If the issue is one of complexity, would not Labour Members accept that not only fraud trials are complex? Earlier, I gave the example of a drugs trial in which I was involved years ago, which bore all the hallmarks of the complexity that the Solicitor-General argues should lead to a judge-only trial. It involved hundreds of thousands of documents and financial dealings all over the world, yet under the Government's provision that complex case would not be subject to a judge-only trial. My hon. Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) made the excellent point that health and safety cases in which he has been involved have been just as complex as any fraud trial could be. If the issue is one of length, then surely we should be focusing on case management to shorten cases.
	If those are weak arguments for the Government to advance, I have concluded that it is essential for this House to vote against the Bill for a different reason—because I am convinced that it is yet another step along the road that this Government wish to travel, leading in due course to a massive reduction in jury trials throughout our criminal justice system. It continues a shift of power away from the people and fits neatly with the Government's desire to move power nearer to the centre, based on a presumption that the state or its appointed officers know much better than the people.
	If we could be absolutely certain that no more than, say, six complex or lengthy fraud trials a year would be handled by a judge alone without a jury, we might just be satisfied, but we cannot be certain. Let us consider what the Solicitor-General said earlier. When I mentioned the complicated drugs case, he used the phrase, "We have no plans at this stage." Later on, in response to another intervention, he said, "We have no plans." Previously, unless I misheard him, he had said that the Government have "not ruled out" extending the proposals. So we have a Government who talk about half a dozen cases a year and a Minister who has more or less made it plain to the House that it is at the back of their mind to extend the principle beyond complex and lengthy serious fraud cases to other cases altogether.
	Looking back on the Government's attitude to jury trial over the past few years gives greater strength to our feelings that they may yet go further. This is the Government who some years ago introduced measures that would have given the courts, not the defendant, the ultimate decision on where cases were to be tried, thereby taking rights away from defendants—the Government who had the gall to say that they were convinced that the courts, rather than defendants, were best qualified to reach a view on the best venue for a trial. That smacks of a conceited, "we know better than you" attitude—scant concern there for the rights of the individual.
	I think that I heard the Solicitor-General say—I could hardly believe it—"Juries are right for some cases, but not for others." That kind of comment makes me think that we have a Government who are saying in terms, "Now listen: we're not going to bother any more with the rights of the individual to select trial by his peers—his equals, other members of his community. We're not bothered about that—we're more concerned with our own view as to what is right for a particular defendant."
	If we concede the principle that complex or lengthy fraud cases should be tried by a judge alone without a jury, the Government's next step might be to try to widen that principle to ensure that all serious offences, for example, could be tried only by a judge alone. Gradually, they could whittle away the whole principle of trial by one's peers. There is a risk that, if this trend continues, jury trial could disappear from our system altogether. All this is happening at a time when the real problem facing the people of this country is the inability of the police to detect the crimes, and to be on the streets to catch the criminals and bring them to court. Frankly, on any list of the public's priorities relating to the criminal justice system, the need for fraud cases to be tried by a judge alone would be right at the bottom.

Richard Shepherd: It is a curiosity that the Members taking part in this debate are representatives of English constituencies. In a sense, that is right because we are talking about England and English law. So far, everyone who has spoken has been a lawyer. I am not. I am proud, however, to have heard the lawyers. With the exception of but one from Cheshire—

Richard Shepherd: I will continue. With the exception of the hon. Gentleman, to whom I will give way later, all those lawyers have made reference to something that is wider and that unites us: a sense of England. If anyone were to describe that sense of England, they would think of the history of this country. One of the features of the history of this country that has given confidence to its people over the centuries is that an ordinary man may sit in a jury and decide on the truth of a case. It cannot be suborned.
	That was not easily won. We had Star courts. From Magna Carta, we had the concept that nobles alone should judge themselves. The very words in Magna Carta, however, can be used to mean something else—that each and every one of us shall be tried by our peers. We, the people, will try ourselves. Why is it that in common law jurisdictions—Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the United States—that is a constitutional requirement and cannot be suborned by an Executive? Why are we not asking ourselves that question?
	I believe profoundly that our very sense of liberty and confidence in our system of government and its institutions derive from the participation of the common man and woman in the great institutions of state. That is why I think that the Government are very misdirected in seeking to throw out a feature of our system of government that has survived across eight centuries or so. The common law tradition is remarkable, and as many of the lawyers who have spoken today have said, it is a feature that is often commented on by other countries with different systems. I do not denigrate the intent behind other legal systems. I know that they seek the same objective that we seek, which is justice, although their perspective is different from ours. Our system, however, has been central to the equality of the citizen in this country, and the march that took us there.
	In the past 10 years, the extraordinary progress of this Government in seeking to modernise the institutions of state so casually and in such a half-baked fashion has created a cynicism about motives and aspirations. Not only do I feel that they so often misdirect themselves; I think that the incompetence associated with the measures that they propose undermines what was central to the jury system—confidence in the law, and hence confidence in justice.
	It is not an old hanging judge who decides whether I am guilty. He may pass sentence, but it is others who decide, picked at random from the people of our country. The jury system is a check on the misogyny or the narrowness—if it is true—of judges. It is a check—if it is true—on the instruments and intentions of Government, because the greatest Government can be brought to a halt by the decisions of those in the jury box. Why does Blackstone, a constitutional authority, prize the institution of the jury across seven centuries? Why does Devlin, in his "Trial by Jury", see in it the many little parliaments of England? Because it is the common man and woman who are having an impact on decisions that affect lives.
	When we talk about justice, we must feel that the system is fair, we must feel that it is open, and we must feel that that it is accessible. Now the great minds that form this Government think that that is not appropriate. I tell them that they again misjudge something that is essential to the character of this country, and hence, by their misdirections, undermine confidence in themselves. But this little jury, the Parliament of England, must express a view on what we stand for. As my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for North Hykeham and Sleaford—

Quentin Davies: We in this House often have our best debates on matters of fundamental and constitutional principle, and that has been the case this afternoon. Wehave heard a number of extremely good—even memorable—speeches, including that of the hon. and learned Member for Medway (Mr. Marshall-Andrews). However, it is striking and very sad that in a debate on such an important matter, apart from the minimum team of the Minister, the Parliamentary Private Secretary and the Whip, only two Labour Members have even sat in on the debate, let alone taken part. Yet presumably they will all pour into the Chamber in an hour or two to vote down one of the fundamental liberties of the subject that has been with us for hundreds of years. The Labour party is addressing our constitutional liberties with an awesome and breathtaking degree of levity.

Quentin Davies: I do not know where the hon. Gentleman is coming from. This is not a timetable motion debate; it is a Second Reading debate on a self-standing Bill. It is true that there have been attacks before—over the centuries—on our fundamental liberties, including trial by jury, and those attacks have been seen off, including previous ones by this Government, but that does not make the issue under discussion any less important.
	I always approach such issues in the same way as my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg) evidently does—perhaps there is something in the Lincolnshire air that makes us automatically adopt the same attitude. I first address them as issues of principle, and then as issues of pragmatism, and then I test whether the pragmatic arguments are sufficiently strong to deserve that some compromise be made in the fundamental principle.
	The issue of principle is threefold. Opposition Members are all making similar points—they are mutually supportive and consistent points, and to a degree there is an overlap, but each Member has a slightly different perspective. I start from the position that although we in this country do not have a written constitution and we therefore do not have any foundational law, if we did have a foundational law Magna Carta would come as close as is possible to being it. The idea of trial by jury began in Magna Carta; so far as I know, its reference to trial by peers is the first time in the history of the human race that that idea was enshrined in a constitution-type document. It has not only been with us in this country ever since, but it has been followed by scores of countries around the world—in fact, by all those that have respectable systems of justice. We should treat it with the greatest respect and be extremely sceptical about eroding it.
	I must give credit to the House of Commons Library for drawing to my attention a quotation fromSir William Blackstone. It is good for all Members to read Blackstone because there is no more eloquent advocate of our constitutional liberties and the rationale for them. For the benefit of those who have not read the note produced by the Library—that is a wonderful task that it always performs on such debates for Members—I wish to read out a few lines of it:
	"yet let it be again remembered, that delays and little inconveniences in the forms of justice, are the price that all free nations must pay for their liberty in more substantial matters; that these inroads upon this sacred bulwark of the nation are fundamentally opposite to the spirit of our constitution; and that, though begun in trifles, the precedent may gradually increase and spread, to the utter disuse of juries in questions of the most momentous concern."
	Those words were penned, presumably, rather more than 200 years ago, as they are part of Blackstone's "Commentaries", but they might have been penned for this debate.

Quentin Davies: I did not know that and I am very grateful to the hon. Gentleman for intervening and pointing that out to me and to the House in general. I obviously do not follow as closely as I should, and as he does, proceedings in the other place on these important matters. My starting point is that there must be a very strong presumption against eroding these fundamental liberties, and I am very glad that the Liberal Democrats are with us on this matter this afternoon.
	I come to the second point of principle about which I feel strongly. It is extremely important for public confidence in our criminal justice system that it not become the protected private preserve of a professional caste. With due respect to those of my right hon. and hon. Friends, and colleagues in all parts of the House, who are professional lawyers, it is not healthy for the law to become an arcane, closed system whereby the only people in a courtroom who are not lawyers are the defendant and the doorman. The jury system draws the wider citizenry into the process in a systematic way, which is extremely valuable.
	The third point of principle is that creating a two-tier criminal justice system is profoundly problematic. We all know that the distinction between people who have an automatic right, or the right to elect trial by jury, and those who are dealt with in a summary fashion, is a distinction between lesser and more serious offences. We could argue all afternoon about what constitute lesser and more serious offences, but the general point of common sense has always been that a serious offence is where a conviction would have had a very damaging and perhaps devastating effect on the life of the individual so convicted, because of the damage to their reputation or the considerable loss of liberty arising from a substantial sentence. We would all agree that, in that sense, speeding is not a very serious offence but murder is. We have to draw the line somewhere.
	If the Bill proceeds today, serious fraud, which has always been considered an extremely serious offence and usually involves a very long custodial sentence on conviction—so that it undoubtedly and without the slightest ambiguity falls into that category of a serious offence—will no longer be appropriate for jury trial. That is a very serious and damaging development. In the category of serious offences, there will be a two-tier system of justice, with some types of offence being tried in front of a jury—as we have discovered this afternoon, we must worry about how long even that will last under this Government if they pursue their agenda—and others being tried only by a judge, with no right to jury trial, thereby contradicting the Magna Carta principle. That is a two-tier system.
	In the light of what the Solicitor-General has said this afternoon, I am a great deal more worried about this issue than I was at midday, before the debate started. He seemed to say in support of his proposals that under his system, a judge could read a great deal of evidence, which would not therefore come out in front of the court. Of course, it is perfectly proper and desirable that when a judge is presiding over a jury trial, he does a lot of homework before the trial opens, simply from the point of view of managing the trial effectively. That is fine—if the judge is not going to reach a verdict. However, the idea of a judge with responsibility for reaching a verdict reading before the trial begins material that will not be delivered in open court, and which cannot therefore be challenged by the defendant or his or her counsel, is deeply troubling. It is extremely subversive of the whole principle that evidence should be available to the court and, equally, to the defence and prosecution, and that the defendants should, at every stage, have an opportunity to challenge any allegations made against them.

Quentin Davies: Well, the Solicitor-General has deepened my concerns. A statement made in court and unchallenged is taken to be accepted. If a defendant does not challenge some material evidence that is used against him, a jury—or, indeed, the judge—may draw negative conclusions from that. But if a judge has read it in his chambers and nobody knows that he has read it, the defendant does not have the opportunity to challenge it. That could be very damaging. The prospect of a two-tier system of justice—with two different standards of evidence, and of challenging and sifting evidence—would no longer be theoretical, but actual. The Government have admitted as much this afternoon, and that is extraordinarily worrying.
	There is no conflict or trade-off between these points of principle and those of pragmatic consideration. When I consider the pragmatic points that have been raised this afternoon, I cannot see even the beginning of a case for eroding, attacking or degrading the essential principles. The Solicitor-General got into a frightful mess this afternoon because he conceded the point that the Government were not suggesting that juries were not capable of understanding the evidence in serious fraud cases and they were not introducing the Bill on that ground.
	I jotted down several remarks that the Solicitor-General made about juries in serious fraud cases, and no doubt others will be reported in  Hansard. He talked about juries' steep learning curve. If that is not patronising or disparaging of their ability to master the evidence, I do not know what is. He also talked about extremely complex and obtuse evidence, with the implication that it would be difficult for juries to understand. So he started by saying that he would not challenge juries' ability to master the evidence, and I can see why, politically, that would be a foolish approach. It would be very patronising of all the good people who take part in those trials and cast an unjustified aspersion on them, so he does not want to say that. However, he then proceeds to use phrases and epithets in the course of the debate that imply that he does have a lack of respect for juries' ability to cope in serious fraud trials. That is a contradiction in the Government's position.
	Much of the Government's supporting publicity material has been based on the assumption that juries cannot cope with such cases and, as a result, we have to change the basis of the law. The Solicitor-General also said that it had been the case in the past, and that under this regime the evidence had had to be simplified and fewer charges laid and that it was not possible to bring the full criminality involved to the attention of the courts. The implication is that juries cannot get their poor little heads around more than a small number of charges. In practice, the argument makes sense only on the assumption—which he explicitly rejected—that the Solicitor-General does not believe that juries are capable of performing that role.

Quentin Davies: The Solicitor-General has not dealt with the fears and suspicions that I have set out. On the contrary, it was his opening remarks that created them in the first place. He has talked about juries facing a "steep learning curve" and having difficulties with "abstruse" evidence. If such statements do not imply that juries find it difficult to understand the evidence, I do not know what they do imply, or whether they have any meaning in the English language.

Quentin Davies: I will give way in a second, after I have finished this point. Is the Solicitor-General trying to say that trials have been taking too long? Alternatively, is he claiming that it has been necessary for the prosecution to simplify indictments and not bring as many charges as would otherwise be the case, with the result that the full criminality of events alleged in the course of proceedings is not expressed? If so, that makes no sense unless the implication is that more complex indictments could be brought forward if juries were got rid of and, in turn, that makes no sense unless the concomitant implication is that judges are able to understand what juries cannot. My contention is that the only logical conclusion to be drawn from what the Solicitor-General has said is the one that I have set out.  [Interruption.] However, in the interests of justice, which I believe in, I shall give the hon. and learned Gentleman a brief right of reply, and then give wayto my hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd, West (Mr. Jones).

Quentin Davies: No. This may be a technical point, but it is an important aspect of the law. The Solicitor-General raises some important, pragmatic considerations. Every week, prosecuting authorities, such as the SFO and the Crown Prosecution Service, and the counsel they appoint and brief, have to take important decisions about such matters. The Solicitor-General and I take a different view. I disagree with him completely. Justice does not require that the indictment be exhaustive; it does not require that every act that might be deemed contrary to the law, and therefore criminal, should be included in the indictment. I do not believe that at all.
	As elsewhere in human life, we have to concentrate on the essentials. Human time—like other resources such as money—is not infinite. Whether the case is being heard by a judge or a jury, we do not want it to go on for a month of Sundays; we want to deal with the essential points—the essential criminality—and prosecute the egregious offences. If a guy has been convicted of a rape and a murder, it does not much matter if we forget about the fact that he has a few motoring offences on his record. Anyway, if there is a conviction on the major charge in a serious fraud case and other offences are taken into account, it barely affects the sentence. It would not affect the sentence at all if the other sentences were concurrent so there would be no practical effect. The idea that we can achieve platonic perfection in the law courts and expose all the criminality is wrong and futile. We cannot succeed and it is dangerous to try because we shall muddle the justice system and make it much more difficult for people—not just juries or judges, but people outside—to understand the essentials of the incident that led to the prosecution.

Quentin Davies: I agree. One should not try to anticipate precisely how long a trial will be before it starts. That would be contrary to the interests of justice. One might genuinely think that the matter could be resolved in a week or two, but issues might arise, or the defence might want to call additional witnesses, and it could take longer.
	That is not to say that trials should not be effectively managed. As I said earlier, there is a contradiction in the requirement on the judge to preside over the trial effectively and manage it properly—which means that he has to read himself into the case in advance to assess what the main points are likely to be—and giving him the obligation to reach a verdict. He can reach a verdict only on the basis of evidence that is made fully available to the defence, so that the defence has a full opportunity to challenge it during the trial. If the judge is reading material privately or in chambers before the trial starts, he cannot reach a verdict on that basis. There is a conflict of interest. This is a matter of principle, as I pointed out earlier, but it has important pragmatic considerations.
	I have dealt with the principle as clearly as I can, so I shall continue on pragmatism. When we consider the historical, empirical evidence, there is general agreement that the Jubilee line trial collapsed for reasons that were nothing to do with the jury; they were the first people to be taken aback by the fact that the trial had collapsed and expressed themselves quite clearly on that point, as they did about the patronising suggestion that it was something to do with them because they were unable to master the evidence. They had no opportunity to reach a verdict, so the collapse was nothing to do with them.
	The Solicitor-General mentioned several other well-known cases, such as Maxwell, Blue Arrow and, I think, Guinness 2. Those cases collapsed becauseof mistakes made by the prosecution, including sometimes the desire to over-prosecute and put too much into the indictment—just to rub in the point I made when I dealt with the Solicitor-General's intervention. It is a mistake to over-charge. Indeed, I think that one pays lawyers—one normally pays them very expensively—for their ability to identify the essentials of a case, not to waste time, and not to obfuscate but to clarify. So that is an indictment of the prosecution of these cases. Sometimes the trial judge simply loses control of the case, and that may well have been so with Jubilee line. In a way, we are treating the jury as a scapegoat—an innocent sacrificial victim—for the failings of professional lawyers in the form of judges or of prosecuting counsel. That is quite a serious injustice in itself and should make us think.
	The final piece of pragmatic evidence and consideration that I want to bring forward has already been mentioned in passing by the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath), anticipating me slightly. We should look at the American experience, because the Americans have been extremely successful in getting convictions in very complex fraud trials. They do not get more complex than Enron or WorldCom.
	Enron's was a scam involving a very complex series of off-balance-sheet accounting mechanisms, which were effectively disguised. I suppose they were disguised from the auditors, but I think that the extent to which the auditors were criminally negligent or not is still a matter of sub judice, so I had better not comment on that, even though we are talking about an American jurisdiction—and frankly I do not know, which is the real reason why I do not comment. But it is extraordinary and amazing that the auditors did not pick it up; I happily say that on the record. Certainly, all those highly paid Wall street analysts—very few earn less than $500,000 a year, and most earn more than $1 million—who were covering Enron did not pick it up. So it was a very clever fraud. It went on for a long time, and we know that it was very damaging.
	That case was complex and it was dealt with by a jury trial. The prosecuting authorities did succeed in getting some plea bargains with the lesser criminals, but the main convictions against Skilling and Lay, the chief executive and the president of the company, were secured against not guilty pleas before a jury. That is a very good test and the system worked very well. The Americans have put inside a whole series of very serious, very sophisticated financial fraudsters; one thinks of Levene, Boesky and Milken, and they do not come bigger or more complex than that. We must take account of the American experience.
	Looking at this as a matter of principle, unless Members on the Labour Benches have a totally different view of the merits and the virtues of our constitution and the legal system—which I do not believe, because I like to think that we all share some of the same cultural, historical values of our country across the Chamber—I cannot see the beginnings of a case for making an attack on the jury system, even this limited attack, let alone any further attack that might be made. It was suggested several times this afternoon that there is a danger that if this wedge goes through, we shall find that a whole new category of criminal trials are excluded from jury trial in the future, perhaps in the Government's next fraud Bill or criminal justice Bill.
	It seems to me to be a matter of principle that no case has been made to make these changes and, pragmatically, we do not have a trade-off. We do not have positive pragmatic arguments working against the principle. We have a clear series of experiences, in this country and in the United States, which weigh very much in favour of keeping the status quo.
	In my opinion the Government's proposals are incredibly misconceived. I am deeply saddened that practically no one from the Labour party has been in the Chamber—just three Back Benchers—and Labour Members will all troop in, without hearing the arguments, and vote the way that the Whips tell them on this matter, which has been brought forward with the greatest degree of levity and lightness of concern for some very deep and important principles.
	I do not always speak in a very friendly way of what I often call the "nominated Chamber" in this legislature, but it will have the role of picking up where we have failed. I just hope, as my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham said, that the other House will ensure that it looks very carefully at the real arguments before it makes a fundamental change in a foundational principle of our liberties.

Bob Spink: I am one of the few non-legal minds contributing to the debate, so it could be said that I speak for the jury side of the equation, and for the common man, or the uninitiated. I rely simply on common sense. Trial by jury is a matter of fundamental principle that defines our national character and traditions of fairness.
	My story starts at Runnymede in 1215, when King John, who was about as popular then as the Prime Minister is now, was forced to adopt the Magna Carta, which became the keystone of what I believe is our constitution. Over the years, it has underpinned many legislatures around the world. It has helped to seed good governance and fair and transparent justice, and to prevent corruption in judicial systems.
	Even today, countries such as Iran can benefit from its guidance, at a time when the Prime Minister is trying to destroy it in this country. The Magna Carta is more than just history: it is alive and well today. It has led the world in developing principles of fair play and freedom, and getting right the balance of power and control between the state and the individual. It is also about ending the tyranny of the too often brutal power that the state sometimes exercises over its people. Now is no time to be dismantling such protection.
	Perhaps the most important provision of the Magna Carta was that it codified the existing and long-standing practices of trial by jury. Under habeas corpus, no person may be imprisoned or have his property confiscated without prior trial by his equals. That is a vital feature of the story of democratic development because it represents the first time that the authority of the state was ever specifically limited. It was the first step on the long road to what became universal enfranchisement.
	The principle of trial by jury of one's peers, which was established in Magna Carta, was consolidated by the William and Mary declaration of rights of 1689. It continued the encoding of our constitution and the fundamental protections of the individual againstthe not unknown possibility of an overbearing state. The 1689 declaration stated:
	"That Jurors ought to be duly impanelled and returned."
	That is as relevant today to us as the American declaration of independence is to the American people. It is not some old archaic curiosity. I accept that it may sometimes appear attractive to dispense with inconvenient rights and principles that seem, on sloppy analysis, to stand in the way, but when those rights have been won through blood, sweat and tears over 850 years of history, and when they underpin our very freedoms, we dump them at our peril.
	The Government do not seem to have in their hearts a love or even a respect for our history and traditions. I sometimes doubt whether they value at all the fight led over centuries by this mother of Parliaments for freedom and human rights around the world. For the Prime Minister to start to destroy trial by jury, and drive home the thin end of what I will argue is a destructive wedge, would be an act of historic folly. That is not just incompetence or unknowing tort, but an act of vandalism—and for what purpose? What possible prize is to be won by that? How cheaply will the Government cast aside our historic freedoms? Incredibly, they will do so, they assert, simply to get easier, quicker or more certain convictions in a few serious fraud cases. Fraud is a property crime, which does not compare to crimes of violence, the abuse of children or terrorism. That only adds insult to the injury of this House, which has fought long and hard over centuries to win and then to protect the rights of the individual, of which trial by jury is one of the most important.
	Having set out the historic backdrop, let me turn to the contemporary and pragmatic arguments. The Bill is particularly invidious when we consider the existence of much better solutions to the problem of long and complex fraud trials. There is no evidence that juries prolong trials or that jurors are incapable of following the evidence in a fraud trial any more than in any other class of trial. Jurors have generally done a good job over hundreds of years and thousands of trials. They have secured and maintained high levels of public confidence in the judicial system.
	A panel of 12 independent members of the public has generally managed to grasp the essential issues of innocence or guilt, even when the legal issues are complex. The lawyers can argue the legal machinations. If they make the effort, they can put the issues across coherently to a jury. That is important in itself, to ensure that justice can be seen to be done by ordinary people, as my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg) explained to the House. Barristers are clever and decent people—we all know that, because the House is full of them.
	Fraud trials are special in that they often pivot on the question of whether the defendant has acted dishonestly. The technical legal test for dishonesty centres on what an ordinary citizen perceives to be dishonest. It is not just an optional extra in fraud to have ordinary citizens sitting in judgment. It is absolutely essential that ordinary, independent people decide on the matter of dishonesty in fraud cases. Judges have a sophisticated and intimate knowledge of the process of law, but, with respect to my hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr. Malins) who spoke earlier, that necessary strength in a judge may get in the way of the more detached, ordinary and independent insight of a group of 12 fair-minded members of the public applying their experience and common sense in a collective manner to the issues that they are considering. The jury sees the issues from a totally different perspective from that of the judge. Neither perspective is better than the other. My contention is that both perspectives are essential, valuable and indispensable parts of the whole system.
	It is not obvious why the Government have resurrected this ill-considered measure. A number of my colleagues have speculated on why they might have done so. It is not obvious, because there is no public demand for it. People do not stay late at the "Hoy and Helmet" pub in Benfleet to argue the case for the Bill to be brought forward.
	One of the benefits of jury trials is that they underpin the renowned incorruptibility of judges, which relies, at least in part, on the checks and balances of the jury system, as the hon. and learned Member for Medway (Mr. Marshall-Andrews) pointed out earlier. There would be significant procedural and safety issues, because judges see and hear evidence and submissions during a trial that are rightly kept from juries because they might improperly influence their verdict. I am thinking, for instance, of previous records and items that are ruled inadmissible. Just how that is to be handled has not been explained at all by those on the Government Front Bench.
	We are told that the measure would affect only 10 or 20 out of tens of thousands of jury trials. However, those few trials each year could well be the thin end of the wedge. Experience has taught us to distrust the Government, so their indication that the measure is just for serious fraud is pretty worthless. Trial without jury could be expanded to other types of crime. For instance, terrorist trials can be extraordinarily complex and lengthy—the stated problems that engendered the Bill—but the international consequences of terrorist trials without jury may be unhelpful in retaining the moral high ground and in securing hearts and minds in the battle for international and national security. Some would argue that corporate manslaughter demands specialist knowledge from jurors. We can also add to the list serious organised crime, corruption and conspiracy. The way in which the Bill is drafted suggests that its scope is intended to go much wider than a few serious fraud cases. A future Government, under pressure from hard cases, might find it irresistible to bring other types of crime into the provisions for trial without jury. We all know the axiom: hard cases make bad law.
	I do not accept that there is a unique problem with fraud trials. The Attorney-General told Parliament that fraud conviction rates were 70 per cent., compared with a general conviction rate of 75 per cent.—although the Solicitor-General pointed out earlier that in a restricted survey, he found that the conviction rate for serious fraud was 61 per cent. However, even that is a much better conviction rate than the miserable rates for some cases of rape or child abuse, so will the Solicitor-General be arguing that we abolish juries for those trials?
	If there is a serious problem with a few fraud cases each year, we could tackle it without destroying one of the key tenets of good governance and justice. The Crown Prosecution Service could manage cases better and set them out more effectively. It could present fewer and clearer issues that could be more quickly and easily explained and supported by evidence. We could hold a trial of specimen counts before a jury and put remaining counts to a judge alone to make cases more manageable.
	I do not subscribe to the Government's implied "stupid jury" argument. Nevertheless, we could get more professional people on to juries by tightening up the jury exemption rules that some people use to avoid their public duty. We could give better support to juries during the process, without removing their duty to decide the matters in front of them. Many of those points were covered very well by the Wooler report. The Bill will create the concept of a first and second-class justice system, with white-collar crime treated differently from blue-collar crime. That will carry enormous risks for the justice system and would be likely to undermine public confidence.
	The Bill will move trials to the High Court instead of the Crown court. Sadly, I depart from our Front-Bench policy on this, although no doubt my Front-Bench colleagues will disabuse me of my thoughts later. I do not think that it is necessarily a good idea to put serious fraud into the civil rather than the criminal jurisdiction. That would
	"compound the concern that the removal of a jury is likely to make serious fraud appear a regulatory rather than criminal affair."
	That is a quote from Liberty, which promotes civil liberties and human rights.
	The Solicitor-General seemed to contradict his own arguments at the start of the debate. He said that he thought that juries could not understand complex and long cases, but he also said—I quote him—that stupid juries are not a reason for the Bill. He said that over-long trials were a key reason for the Bill, but he also said that he had no plans at present to employ trials without jury in other equally long cases. His presentation was riddled with anomalies and contradictions.

David Jones: It does indeed. My right hon. and learned Friend is quite right. I have no doubt that the adherence to liberty is also reflected among Irish Members, although unfortunately I cannot see any present in the Chamber today.
	For more than 800 years the right to a trial by jury has been one of the cornerstones of liberty in this country and this conjoined jurisdiction of England and Wales. The crucial importance of the jury system cannot be overstated. It tempers a potentially oppressive prosecution, and the occasional phenomenon, which is not unknown, of the case-hardened judge, by the application of the common sense and breadth of experience frequently provided by 12 ordinary men and women of diverse backgrounds.
	The jury system has an important role in encouraging and binding a developed civic society by ensuring that people from all walks of life—young, old, men, women and people of diverse ethnic backgrounds—contribute to and play their visible part in the administration of our legal system. In that respect, it may fairly be argued—indeed, it was argued by my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills—that the jury system plays a fundamental part in our democracy.
	My hon. Friend quoted from Devlin's well-known work, "Trial by Jury", in which he refers to every jury being a little Parliament. Devlin deserves to be quoted further, because he went on to say:
	"The first object of any tyrant in Whitehall would be to make Parliament utterly subservient to his will and the next to overthrow or diminish trial by jury, for no tyrant could afford to leave a subject's freedom in the hands of 12 of his countrymen."
	Devlin also said that the jury was
	"the lamp that shows that freedom lives".
	We therefore undermine the right to a jury trial at our greatest peril. By doing so we are undermining the very democracy that should be the bulwark of this country.
	As other Members have pointed out, the Government have made repeated attempts to reduce the circumstances in which trial by jury is available. They have presented to Parliament two mode of trial Bills, whose purpose was to eliminate the right of the accused to elect for trial by jury in either-way offences. In the face of robust opposition, principally in the other place, both Bills were defeated.
	It is interesting to note—as was pointed out, I think, by the hon. and learned Member for Medway (Mr. Marshall-Andrews)—that having attempted and failed to attack the jury system by approaching the less serious cases, the Government have now changed tack and seek, through an amendment to the Criminal Justice Act 2003 in this Bill, to remove the right to trial by jury in the more serious cases. It is clear that now that the Government have failed at one end of the criminal spectrum, they are seeking to undermine the jury system by attrition, from the other end, by starting with the more serious cases. Like many other Conservative Members, I firmly believe that the right to jury trial is such a fundamental right that any attempt to erode it should be strongly resisted. If we do not resist that attempt, it will send us down the slippery path towards being deprived of our democracy.
	The ostensible reasons behind the proposal have already been analysed to some extent, but they deserve further scrutiny. We are told that the removal of the right to jury trial would occur only if a High Court judge was satisfied that the complexity or length of the trial was likely to make the trial
	"so burdensome to the members of a jury ... that the interests of justice require that serious consideration should be given to the question of whether the trial should be conducted without a jury."
	The question of what is "burdensome" immediately arises.
	The Solicitor-General has said that the Government's approach is to relieve jurors from the burden of participating in long criminal trials, but that is a dangerous path to take. Many jurors regard serving on a jury not as a civic duty but a civic privilege, and we heard my hon. Friend the Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) speak on the subject. For centuries, citizens have regarded it a part of their duty to sit on juries, if called to do so, and give a fair hearing to their fellow citizens when they are charged with an offence.
	On the issue of complexity, the Solicitor-General suggested that he was not advancing the "stupid jury" argument, but it is hard to see what other construction can be put on the word "complexity". Presumably, it is intended to suggest that some cases are so difficult that it is likely that jury members will lack the power of concentration or the intellectual capacity to deal with them. That is an arrogant and patronising attitude, and it is offensive not only to juries but to every citizen of this country who may be called on to serve on one. It is clear that the Government do not trust their own citizens to have sufficient mental capacity or powers of concentration to focus on the issues that may be dealt with in serious fraud trials.
	Juries consist of people from all walks of life and backgrounds, and they comprise university dons and dustmen. However, it is the collective wisdom of the jury that prevails, and that collective wisdom may frequently be equal to, if not greater than, the wisdom of those who present the case in court. It is patronising in the extreme to suggest that juries are incapable of understanding the issues in a complex fraud trial, as was pointed out by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg). At the heart of all serious fraud cases is the issue of dishonesty, and it has been demonstrated amply, over many years, that jurors are morethan capable of deciding whether an individual is honest or dishonest. Furthermore, to second-guess the intellectual capacity of a jury is to second-guess the intellectual capacity of the country at large. That ought not to be countenanced, and we ought not to go along with it.
	Previous speakers have used the words "slippery slope" and "thin end of the wedge", and they were absolutely right to do so. Today, we are considering whether a fundamental building block of our national democracy should be removed—the issue is as serious as that. I am glad that the hon. Member for Wirral, West (Stephen Hesford) has re-entered the Chamber, because I found it offensive when he referred to the proposal as a "case management" issue. It is not that; it goes to the very heart of our democracy and our liberty. If that is the attitude of Labour Members, it shows the contempt with which they regard the British people. This is an odious, reprehensible Bill. I will oppose it, as will other Conservative Members, and I hope that it will be savaged in another place.

Andrew Pelling: I listened carefully to the reasons given by the Solicitor-General and his hon. Friend the Member for Wirral, West (Stephen Hesford) for introducing the Bill again.
	The issue is not the lack of jury capability, neither is it the length of cases brought before court; otherwise, the Bill would include a general proposal about the prospective length of cases other than fraud. The Solicitor-General said that more than 60 per cent. of cases taken to court result in a successful prosecution, so the Bill was not introduced to tackle a failure to prosecute fraud successfully. He referred to the desire that cases be dealt with expeditiously, and he emphasised—this appears to be the Government's main argument—that the burden on the jury is the primary issue and reason for introducing the Bill. It is for the House to consider whether the burden on jurors is such that we wish to give up the rights of Her Majesty's subjects to trial by their peers. The argument, bearing in mind my colleagues' strong comments throughout our debate, is that the burden on 12 members drawn from the electorate in England, Wales and Northern Ireland is such that we should give up those rights.
	Abolition appears to be an expedient solution, and some hon. Members asked whether it will set a precedent. The Solicitor-General said that there were no plans for treating it as a precedent for further legislation to withdraw the right to jury trial, but I would be more reassured if he had said that there was no intention to introduce such a change in future. I was particularly disturbed by references to Diplock courts.

Andrew Pelling: That is helpful, but it might have been better if that comment had been made earlier.
	Many cases that have been heard under the judicial system are as complicated as fraud cases, and ordinary members of the public are able to make a judgment about the dishonesty of people charged with a certain type of fraud. We heard from Members with experience of the legal profession that it is not the fraud itself that is the problem but whether the individuals on trial are at the heart of case. I do not take offence at the suggestion from the hon. Member for Wirral, West about good court management, but the effective management of court cases is more likely to reduce the burden on juries than the proposals in the Bill.
	We heard about pressure on judges, who would become the primary purveyors of justice in fraud cases. No doubt only a limited number of judges would have the specialist knowledge to consider such cases, and, if they are to try cases on their own, we must be concerned about moving to a continental system where judges are more exposed to pressures from the criminal community.
	We have heard only two speeches in favour of the Bill. My hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) spoke about the casual way in which such so-called legislative reform is introduced in the House. It must be disturbing to those in the Public Gallery to have heard so many speeches against the Bill, yet to know the House is so weak that the Bill will nevertheless be progressed through its Second Reading on a three-line Whip. Is the argument important to the Solicitor-General, or, given the ability of the other place to vote down the Bill, will he ensure that the Parliament Act is used so that the opposing voices in both Houses are ignored?

David Burrowes: I declare an interest as a practising criminal solicitor. Indeed, my firm has been a member of the serious fraud panel. With that interest and understanding, I shall make some preliminary comments.
	I was involved in one of the most substantial fraud cases. It went on for some 10 years before it reached court, continued for a further 12 months before the jury was involved, and eventually collapsed as a result of legal argument. That illustrates the possible complexity and extreme length of fraud cases and the fact that the jury may not be involved in the problems inherent in such serious and complex cases.
	I declare a particular interest, having been summonsed to do jury service. Despite some protestations, I must do my duty, and properly so, at the central criminal court next year. I shall put to the test the "stupid juror" theory to which my hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Mr. Garnier) referred. Perhaps on Report I shall be able to report back on whether my fellow jurors and I pass that test. The view, implicit in the Government's case, that jurors are stupid is improper and patronising.
	Parliament has a fundamental interest in the argument. As my hon. Friends have noted, Sir Patrick Devlin pointed out that each jury is a little parliament. Parliament and juries are mutually dependent for their strength. The scant interest in the Bill shown by those on the Government Benches is indicative of the Government's approach. Some may say that is because the issue has been discussed before and this is the third or possibly the fifth round.
	However, the Bill is of fundamental importance, and the lack of interest among Government Members may indicate their subservience to the Government. Devlin highlighted the concern that the first act of a tyrant, however well intentioned its purpose, leads to the subservience of a Parliament and the second act diminishes and extinguishes juries. On the Opposition Benches, there is no such subservience. We will challenge the Bill and look to the other place to do likewise and stand in the way of the Government. It is in the interests of lawyers, jurors, and the state—indeed, of everybody—to seek to secure successful prosecutions. The jury system is a cornerstone of our democracy and, importantly, commands a high level of public confidence.
	As Sir Patrick Devlin said, we should recognise that the jury ensures that Englishmen—and, in deference to my hon. Friend the Member for Clwyd, West (Mr. Jones) to Welshmen, and to those in Northern Ireland—get the justice they like, not the sort that the Government think is good for them. At the root of the Bill is the Government's belief that they have a monopoly on what is justice, and they are seeking to impose that through the Bill. We want to ensure that that choice should continue to be with the people through their participation by way of the jury.
	I shall try to be as charitable to the Government as possible. They have referred to the stresses, strains and burdens involved in the jury system. However, everyone recognises the value of the principle of judgment by his or her peers, so is there good reason to sacrifice it in cases of serious fraud?
	I was in practice, and I can recognise the problem, as we all can. Too many cases of serious fraud are not successfully prosecuted, and the length of time taken to deal with those that are investigated and prosecuted is a matter of great concern and must be dealt with properly. However, in justifying their restrictions on jury trials, the Government go from one argument to another. We heard about the length and complexity of cases, as well as the inadequacy of juries. We might not use the words of the Solicitor-General, who referred to the stupid juror test, but the implication is that they are unable to cope. His final argument was that it is necessary to address the full criminality of the case.
	Has the Solicitor-General made the case for sacrificing the important principle of the jury on the basis of length and complexity? I do not agree that juries cause the length of cases.

David Burrowes: That point has also been made by other hon. Members. Nevertheless, it has been part of the Solicitor-General's argument that cases such asthe Jubilee line and Blue Arrow have causedmany problems. In Her Majesty's chief inspector's suggestions on what to do about those burdens, he was talking not only about the Jubilee line case but about the problem that some trials are of substantial length. He said that such cases did not need to be taken away from a jury; rather, they needed a proper structure and support, and they needed to be planned effectively to minimise the disruption for jurors and to provide authoritative assistance. That needs to happen, and I would be interested to find out what progress has been made in that regard, and also what steps have been taken that have not worked, that justify taking this extra step of sacrificing the principle of trial by jury. I should be happy to give way to the Solicitor-General if he can tell me what steps have been taken as a result of those suggestions to avoid the situation that we find ourselves in now.
	If we are to make this sacrifice, it is important to recognise that there would be a limited number of cases involved. Of the 40,000 or so cases going to the Crown court, we are talking about 20 or so cases, and about six this year. Indeed, in four years, only 26 cases have lasted more than six months. That puts this matter in perspective, if the Government are using those cases as a justification for going down this route.
	Case management is highly relevant to this issue. The criminal procedure rules were introduced at the end of March for quite proper reasons, in order to streamline cases, to make interviews more succinct and to ensure that the length of trials could be reduced wherever possible. But where is the evidence that any of the six cases this year has not been properly streamlined and reduced in length? Must we still go a large step further and seek to undermine the principle of trial by jury?
	The Government's next justification for sacrificing that principle is that of complexity. By implication, that justification casts aspersions on the members of the jury—my fellow jurors, if I were asked to serve on a jury in a fraud trial. I should have to see whether I could get that length of time off to do so, but no doubt that would be the case. Would we, the jury, be able to cope with the complexity? That is the essential question for jurors. It is plainly patronising to question a jury's ability to cope, and there is little evidence that they could not do so. It is a matter of conjecture, and I am worried that that argument is being used to justify taking such a serious step.
	The Government advance an argument about the prosecution being able to establish full criminality. The Solicitor-General has made the point about paring down charges and wanting to prove them. However, the fundamental issue is that justice must be seen to be done. The public are explicitly involved in that process by being members of a jury. A trial is not there just for the lawyers, for the defendants, for the victims or for the judge. It is not there for the state. It is there for the public, and for this country. It is there to provide an understanding of the conviction and the sentence, which is guaranteed by having a jury. We will not all go into the courtroom to listen to what is reported there, but the presence of the jury ensures that the public participate in the important judgment that is made.
	Why is fraud getting such special treatment? Why cannot the Government give careful consideration to how to deal with the burdens of full criminality? Why do they not consider the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act 2004—the protocols of which are being implemented, as I was informed in a note only today—which allows the judge alone to consider similar charges after the defendant has been convicted on a sample count? Why do the Government not consider the effect of that, rather than rushing, as they seem to be doing, to throw away the jury? That leads many of us to suspect that they are not willing to consider the case management rules from last year, or the effects of the Domestic Violence, Crime and Victims Act, but are seeking to abolish jury trial as a point of principle.
	Others have drawn attention to a concern that Blackstone put much more authoritatively and succinctly than I could:
	"these inroads on the sacred bulwark of the nation are fundamentally opposite to the spirit of our constitution; and that, though begun in trifles, the precedent may gradually increase and spread, to the utter disuse of juries in questions of the most momentous concern."
	I invite the Solicitor-General to consider that point.
	Let us deal in isolation with the Solicitor-General's case on full criminality. Why cannot we apply the same principle of wanting to establish full criminality to other cases, such as health and safety cases? The Solicitor-General said that the RCPO might want to deal with financial implications of drugs cases as an adjunct. Where will that lead? Perhaps drugs cases, in which prosecutors must decide which of several defendants and counts to go for, will have that principle applied to them. Why should not we sacrifice the principle of the jury system in relation to terrorist cases, in which it might not be possible to expose full criminality without a complex, lengthy trial? Sadly, if the argument were applied consistently, that would be the case, and it is feared that that will happen.
	The Under-Secretary, the hon. Member for Enfield, North (Joan Ryan), justified the steps to be taken by saying that a double standard in relation to easy-to-prosecute petty frauds and unprosecutable major frauds was unacceptable. Are not double standards, with two different trial systems for criminal cases, exactly what the Bill suggests? A distinction is being made between white collar crime and other crimes. Are not double standards inherent in the Bill? Rather than referring to unprosecutable cases, should not we be dealing with prosecutions?
	To go a stage further, slightly away from the Bill but still on the subject of fraud, is it not the case that many minor frauds are not even investigated? Is not the double standard that one cannot get insurance companies or the police to investigate credit card frauds costing individuals millions? In terms of wanting to deal effectively with fraud, that is where the double standard is, not in the major frauds. The problem of trying to secure a successful prosecution is not dealt with by removing the jury. Instead, we should try to improve prosecutions.
	The Solicitor-General cited magistrates courts as a defence for judge-only decision making, but the core of the magistrates court, as I know it from being there year in, year out, is the lay magistracy. It is the beacon of magistrates. The Government have sought to diminish and limit its role, but it is part and parcel of the magistrates court and of the public participation that is itself part and parcel of the criminal justice system.
	The hon. and learned Member for Medway (Mr. Marshall-Andrews) is right. The Government do indeed have form—considerable form—in relation to removing the opportunity to opt for a jury trial. Form exists in the attempt to remove that opportunity in minor cases, but also in the attempt to prevent defendants themselves from opting for jury trial. That is of great concern to us all.
	As Members in all parts to the House have recognised, burdens are involved in dealing with serious and complicated fraud, but surely that is a price worth paying. Blackstone and others have referred to the price worth paying for justice. Surely we as a Parliament, given our dependence on the jury as a little parliament, should recognise and respect its fundamental importance to Parliament and to the country.
	Tonight, as on other occasions, we must be a jury deciding on the Solicitor-General's case. Has the case been made for doing away with jury trial in limited circumstances? It is certainly not clear, and I would say there is no case to answer. We shall have an opportunity to vote, but given the case made by the Solicitor-General, I think it should be thrown out.

David Heath: It is a pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr. Burrowes). Towards the end of his speech, he referred to the imbalance between cases involving minor offences, which are often not prosecuted and with which I think the criminal justice system fails to deal adequately, and major cases which are often brought to court but then badly prosecuted. That is indeed a difficulty.
	There is a dreary inevitability about the debate. As many speakers have observed, we have been here before. Introducing the debate, the Solicitor-General referred light-heartedly to a repertory company. If we are a repertory company, it is simply because we share the view that there are basic freedoms in this country that we must defend, and jury trial is one of them. It is a monotony, but an inevitable and necessary monotony, that we must be here on so many occasions to respond to the Government in such a way.
	As others have said, there is a history to this. The Government are multiple recidivists, chipping away at the jury system as one of their many attacks on traditional British freedoms. It is possible to wax grandiloquent on these matters, and some Members have done precisely that this afternoon. I do not blame them: there is a temptation to quote the great charter, and to say that this is the fount of our freedoms and something that matters intensely.

David Heath: It is true. At the same time, however, there is a perfectly rational case to be made that does not have to be made in those terms. This is something worth preserving because it is an inherent part of the British—the English and Welsh—criminal justice system, and something that we hold dear.
	I have heard not a word of evidence from the Solicitor-General to prove that the position has changed since we last debated jury trial. I have heard nothing to suggest that experience in the courts requires a change that we blocked in the Criminal Justice Act 2003 because we were so convinced that it was an adverse change—and we received assurances then that it would not proceed without affirmative resolution in both Houses. Indeed, I would say quite the reverse.
	When we consider the statutory changes that have been put in place, the protocols that have been brought in on the management of cases, the changes effected by means of the Fraud Act 2006 that received Royal Assent only very recently and the fact that a fraud review is in place and is due to report soon, the only conclusion that we can draw is that there is one reason and one reason only why the Government are bringing forward this Bill now. By bringing it forward now and having it rejected by another place, they can bring it back again and use the Parliament Act to push it through, because they know perfectly well that the majority in another place and a substantial minority in this House will not stand for it. As they are determined to push it through and they do not have the arguments to support their case, that is the mechanism that they have chosen to use.
	I have still not heard any adequate arguments about why what is good for the United States is not good for us. The US prosecutes many more serious frauds than we do, and it does so successfully and is often proposed as a model of how to prosecute white-collar fraud effectively in the rhetoric of Ministers in our country. I have still not heard an adequate reason why the Americans can manage perfectly well with a jury system and we apparently cannot—why a jury in Texas can do what a jury in London apparently cannot.

David Heath: The hon. Gentleman is nodding that that is the case. I find it alarming that a person who is a lawyer—an officer of the Supreme Court—believes that by transferring responsibility for the determination of fact from a jury to a judge more convictions will be secured when the only change is that the determination of fact is by a person employed by the state rather than 12 free men and women of this country. That is to misunderstand our legal system in a way that I find alarming in a trained lawyer. As a layman, I understand the distinction here, and I would have hoped that the hon. Gentleman would as well.
	There has been constant reference to the complexity of serious fraud. We know that serious fraud is complex; it is of necessity complex. It is the job of prosecuting counsel to lay out those complex matters in a way that is intelligible to the court, and if they are not doing so, they are failing. If the argument is that the case is so complex that it cannot be produced in court at all and can only be handled by a judge in pre-trial proceedings reading through the supporting paperwork and coming to conclusions, we will have a more fundamental change to our legal system than we even suspect from the contents of the Bill.
	If, however, we are simply saying, "Yes, these are complex matters and they will take a certain amount of time," then let us implement some of the procedural changes that we have already put in place. Let us see parts of Bills that we have debated at length in this House put into effect; I am thinking about the multiple count provision in previous legislation over which some of us agonised, only to find, to our horror, that that important issue is left on the shelf for years although it was considered to be a matter of great urgency. Let us see the management of the case deal with the presentation effectively. However, let us not take out the crucial element of British justice—the jury—in deciding how to deal with such matters.
	On the question of the length of cases, I come back to case management. I do not believe that it is necessary for summing-up speeches to take 50, 60, 70, 80 or even more than 100 days. I am sorry, but I do not accept that that is good presentation of, or good management of, a case, and it does not happen in the United States. The hon. Member for Wirral, West said that it is all down to plea-bargaining, but it is not; it is also about case management. I cannot remember the exact number of days that the Enron case took, but I think it was about 50 in total. That would not happen in this country. A similar case would not be heard in that time. That is the difference between the management of cases in the US and here. Let the British Government look at how cases can be presented better and more effectively in court, instead of removing the people who are the determiners of fact.
	Then there is the extraordinary argument, to which I drew attention in an intervention, that because only a limited number of people can be available for the time required, juries become unrepresentative, and a court's representative nature is somehow improved by having the facts decided by one judge, rather than by 12 people drawn at random from the community. That is an absurd argument, and I hope that the Solicitor-General will not advance it again.
	There is also the argument about the full criminality of cases not being displayed. I have mentioned the multiple count legislation, which is already on the statute book. Those hon. and learned Gentlemen who speak with the authority of having acted in a criminal court know perfectly well that it is very rare for the full criminality of a multiple offender to be displayed to the court, because a prosecutor chooses what they will present before the court and what will secure the appropriate penalty. It is a complete red herring on the part of the Solicitor-General to suggest that the only way that justice can be secured is by putting before a court every single count of criminality that could be adduced to it in order to provide complexity, when complexity is actually unnecessary in securing an adequate conviction.
	I was in the room with the Home Secretary of the day—the right hon. Member for Sheffield, Brightside (Mr. Blunkett)—as was the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Mr. Grieve) and my hon. Friend the Member for North Southwark and Bermondsey (Simon Hughes), when we were promised that we would have proper debate, discussions and consultations between the parties on this very important matter. We were not given that. The Attorney-General asked a few of his chums in the other place round for a seminar, and we were told later, "By the way, that was the consultation that you were promised." Our Front Benchers responsible for this issue were never invited to that seminar, or even advised that it was happening. That was the "consultation" between the parties that was supposed to have happened, at which we were supposed to have looked for alternatives to the removal of jury trial. We were not convinced that there would be a result, but we were happy to engage in such a conversation.
	We are left to conclude that the only reason that the Bill is before us today is that the Government are determined to chip away at the principle of jury trial. They have done it once, twice, three times—however many times—and they will continue to do so. I am sure that the Solicitor-General is giving his assurances on best advice and with the best of intentions that nothing further is planned. I am sorry to say, however, that nobody on the Opposition Benches—and not many on the Labour Benches—believes for a moment that, if the Bill is enacted through the use of the Parliament Act, there will not be a return raid yet again to remove elements of our judicial system. The Home Secretary said that the idea that justice is done before a court is an old-fashioned one. Those are the most chilling words that I have ever heard a Home Secretary say. I believe that justice is done in British courts before a British court with a British jury, and I am certainly prepared to defend that.

Edward Garnier: I shall begin by referring to some remarks made by the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr. Heath). Like me, he was present in the Standing Committee meeting on 14 November 2005 when we discussed the same issue with the hon. Member for Slough (Fiona Mactaggart), who was then an Under-Secretary at the Home Office. He and I had the better of the arguments then and I suspect that the House has had the better of the arguments today on the Government's case for the Bill—or their defence against the arguments we have heard.
	Nothing has changed since then, especially not with regard to the Government's ability to understand the opposition to their arguments. The hon. Member for Somerton and Frome's point about the threat of the Parliament Acts is a good one, but it is even better when one considers the Acts that have been pushed through the House—by both Conservative and Labour Governments—by that means. I suspect that in the cool light of day—and of history—Governments repent the use of the Parliament Acts to push through legislation.
	I have a triple advantage—or it may be a triple disadvantage—in that I have been an advocate in front of juries, especially in civil trials, for the past 25 or30 years. I have come to respect the way in which juries, which nowadays are made up of a diverse cross-section of people, deal with the issues in front of them. Some of the jury trials in which I have acted as an advocate have involved simple issues and some have involved complicated issues. However, I have always been impressed by the collective wisdom and common sense of the juries before which I have appeared, both when they have found in favour of my clients and when they have found against them. Sometimes the juries' conclusions, in terms of verdicts and damages, have been deeply unsatisfactory and sometimes they have been deeply satisfactory, but in all cases I have been prepared to support the application of the jury to that aspect of the civil jurisdiction.
	I have also seen the jury system at work within the criminal jurisdiction as a Crown court recorder. In that capacity, I have directed juries, received questions from them, seen advocates address juries and seen defendants' attitudes—including their body language and the way in which they give evidence—to juries. Even though I may disagree with the verdicts reached by juries—although I do not do so often—I am entirely satisfied that the jury is the right forum to decide the facts and issues of guilt or innocence.
	On the point about complexity, I am sure that the hon. and learned Member for Medway (Mr. Marshall-Andrews) will agree that some short trials deal with immensely complicated questions. Alternatively, some very long trials deal with immensely simple factual matrices.
	For example, a trial involving self-defence might last only one or two days but the legal issue is very complicated, requiring careful explanation and consideration by the jury. However, I have yet to read a Court of Appeal case in which it was suggested that the jury could not handle the complicated matters involved. Juries provide a bulwark against the state and the democratic contact between the people and the criminal justice system. We throw them away at our peril, and at the public's peril.
	Finally, I have also had contact with the jury system in a third way—as a member of a jury panel. Like my hon. Friend the Member for Enfield, Southgate (Mr. Burrowes), I was summoned to the central criminal court in February or March this year, and had the thrill, which still awaits him, of attending the Old Bailey for five days. I never got on to a case: I was called for selection as a jury member in five or six trials, but every time my name was pulled out in the ballot I was expelled from the room. It was held that I could not possibly be a fair jury member because I knew either the judge or members of the defence or prosecution teams.
	I had hopes of serving on the jury in a trial in which the hon. and learned Member for Medway was one of the defence counsel. However, he could hardly contain his mirth when he saw that I was the shy and diffident member of the public who had been brought forward to assist him and the other advocates to do justice, and I was sent back upstairs. I got to know the Old Bailey's lift system extremely well but I was never able to try a case, much as I would have liked to.
	I fully accept the analysis of jury membership that the hon. and learned Member for Medway gave earlier, but the people in the Old Bailey's jury waiting room did not consist only of the unemployed, the disabled, or women. The lesson that I learned was that the people waiting to serve came from all areas of the economic, social and ethnic spectrum available for London juries. When people asked not to sit on particular juries, the reasons and excuses that they gave to the judge ranged from difficulties over child care to booked holidays. In my case, problems arose because I knew the judge or members of the defence or prosecution teams.
	Everyone had been summoned to be available for jury service for only two weeks, but pretty well every case was expected to last far longer than that. The whole point of the central criminal court is that it tries big and serious criminal cases that very often last for months. It is certainly not uncommon for them to last for more than two weeks, and I am sure that the hon. and learned Member for Medway will confirm that some cases tried there have lasted almost a year. We all know from our constituency experience, or even from simply reading the news, that lengthy drug-dealing cases—my hon. Friend the Member for Woking (Mr. Malins) mentioned one in which he was involved at Isleworth Crown court—and lengthy cases on terrorism, kidnapping, people trafficking and issues such as the Morecambe bay cockle pickers, require juries to listen to evidence and digest complicated legal issues for some little while.
	There is absolutely nothing in the Government's argument, which was put forward with some confusion by the Solicitor-General, that lengthy cases of fraud are unsuitable to be tried by a jury. If there is anything in that argument, it should apply across the board. The argument should apply to cases of murder, kidnapping or drug dealing; it cannot be sold on the basis that it applies only to complex fraud cases. Cases are lengthy for good or bad reasons. If the reason is bad, it is a matter of management and discipline, which involves the judge. Before that, it is a matter for the prosecuting team to distil the important issues for getting its case across to the jury and for the defendants to show discipline and co-operation, by not wasting time making irrelevant and footling points.
	Co-operation in the criminal process is essential. It is clear to anyone who has bothered to look at the evidence behind the complaints about the length of trials and the failure in some cases to reach a conclusion that the jury has never been the reason for the collapse, as the inspector of the Crown Prosecution Service, Mr. Stephen Wooler pointed out in his report, and the Attorney-General agreed—I think—in his statement to the other place earlier this year. The reason for the collapse has been failure to manage, prepare and co-operate. It is no good the SFO or the CPS handing over the keys to a warehouse of documents and telling the defence team to sort them out; it is the duty of the prosecution to find the documents that are relevant to its case and to explain and disclose them to the defence. The more that judges are given, and exercise, powers to discipline loose prosecution and defendants who through their legal teams fail to co-operate, the more that cases will run efficiently.

Edward Garnier: I am hesitant to reach any accommodation with the hon. Gentleman because I found what he said almost impenetrable. I am not at all sure that the House will want to reflect too long on the remarks he made in his speech. I had intended to do him the service of not referring to it, but as he has provoked me I shall do so.
	The hon. Gentleman advanced an argument based on nothing more than assertion and insult. He insulted his hon. and learned Friend the Member for Medway, who made a cogent case against the Government, yet the hon. Gentleman, having scribbled a few notes on the back of the Bill, allowed us to be impressed by the fact that as he made a less than important point he was comforted by a little nod from the Solicitor-General. But what was particularly worrying, beyond the way in which he presented his argument, was that he thought that the Bill would act as a deterrent against serious fraud and as a measure to produce more guilty pleas. If that is the way in which the Government and their acolytes wish to advance arguments against the jury, we have a lot more to worry about than I originally thought. But I am sure that the House is grateful for what the hon. Gentleman had to say.

Edward Garnier: No, I will not. The hon. Gentleman has given us the benefit of his views and we are able to judge them.
	I agree with the hon. and learned Member for Medway in this. He said that the Bill constituted a serious attack on our civil liberties and that it was unnecessary, unworkable, expensive and unwise. In all of that he was entirely right. He said that, not just from the position of someone who wishes to annoy the Government, but from the position of someone who has even more experience in the criminal courts than my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg), and he was characteristically but none the less modest in drawing to our attention the huge experience that he has in these matters. It is absolutely no good for the Government or their friends to attack him for making arguments based on evidence and long experience—and common sense.
	The protocol that Lord Woolf, then Lord Chief Justice, introduced in March 2005 is barely a year old, and yet the Government are saying that it is of no account. The Fraud Act 2006, which completed its passage through Parliament just before we prorogued, has yet to be made use of and yet no doubt was introduced to this Parliament for a purpose. It has simplified the law of fraud and the way in which our courts will be able to look at alleged fraud. And yet the Government are so hyperactive and so addicted to headline legislation that they do not even wait to draw the conclusions of their own legislation before rushing on to pass another piece of legislation—and in the face of arguments that we have heard any number of times and seen defeated both here and in the other place, albeit I accept that the Government are capable of crashing legislation through as a result of their whipping capacity.
	Many hon. Members on both sides of the House have spoken against the Bill. Those on the Labour Benches, apart from the hon. and learned Member for Medway, expressed their dissatisfaction with the Bill by means of interventions. Others, on the Opposition side of the House, have had the opportunity to speak, some at length and some at less length, about the issues that concern them.
	I can extract some broad themes from the speeches. The first is that the jury system is under attack; and that whether it is under attack in this narrow sense or more broadly, it is none the less the necessary upholder of our civil liberties and the necessary barrier between the state and the citizen, as my hon. Friend the Member for Aldridge-Brownhills (Mr. Shepherd) and others said. It was also said that the jury system is the necessary introducer of the citizen into the criminal justice system and prevents it from being but an esoteric lawyers' fest; I think it is important that we remember that and that we maintain that important break.
	My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham asked three important questions. First, he asked whether it was appropriate for juries to try lengthy and complex serious fraud cases. Not surprisingly he answered that it was, and he used the analogy of drug dealing cases, murder cases and terrorist cases. He went on to ask whether there is a principle that can be established to demonstrate that the Government's case is right. All the Government can do to come anywhere near that is to produce an argument based on Executive convenience. Indeed, Executive convenience—the convenience of this Government—has been promoted to the level of a principle in itself.
	I was disappointed at the manner in which the Solicitor-General advanced his case. Some years ago, I listened with great interest to the late Lord Williams, speaking in the other place on the Criminal Justice (Mode of Trial) Bill—the first of two such Bills, I believe. It was a fine speech in support of an argument that he knew he was going to lose. At his fingertips were all the factual and legal arguments required to convince a sceptical House of Lords. He failed, but he did so with good grace and with a flourish. Tonight we have heard arguments that were confusing, confused, ahistorical and based not on fact, but on the Government's prejudice against the jury system as a whole. Although they try to argue that this is justa narrow piece of legislation, it is but the sharp end of a very big wedge.
	The Government have used arguments based on efficiency, based on the need to deal with delay, based on the need to deal with expense and based on the need to make cases explicable to a jury. The Solicitor-General said that his arguments were not about what I characterise, perhaps unfairly to him, as the stupid jury argument. He said that that was not the case, but he then went on to explain how these serious and lengthy fraud cases were incapable of being understood by a jury and how they needed to be removed from juries so that lawyers and a judge could deal with them and produce the convictions that the Government think appropriate. That is in line, of course, with the Prime Minister's argument that the current criminal justice system is outmoded and requires, as the Government constantly tell us, "modernisation".
	We have it in our power to defeat the Government tonight—if not by votes, at least by argument. My hon. Friends have demonstrated that, as have the two Liberal Democrat spokesmen today. I suggest that we not only convert our arguments into votes, but convert our votes into a majority against the Bill. Believe you me, Mr. Deputy Speaker, even if we do not win here tonight, we will not have lost the argument and there is another place that forms an equal part of our parliamentary system, which will check, advise and warn the Government that they are making a mistake—not just some ordinary and easily remediable mistake, but a fundamental and very dangerous one.

Joan Ryan: I am grateful to all hon. Members who have taken part in the debate. My hon. and learned Friend the Solicitor-General opened the debate, saying that fraud does enormous damage to our national economy and that the Government are determined to modernise our criminal justice system to tackle it. That is indeed our starting point and the outcome of the Bill, if enacted, will be precisely that.
	Before going any further, I would like to say on the record that we are talking about a change that will affect 0.02 per cent. of fraud trials, leaving 99.9 per cent. of the 28,000 jury trials held each year unchanged. I say that for the sake of context and perspective.
	The Government have no doubt at all that trial by jury is not the best way of dealing with the most serious and complex fraud cases. They are supported in that view by a long line of distinguished authorities, going back to Lord Roskill's committee in 1986, the establishment of the Serious Fraud Office and Lord Justice Auld's independent review—all were attempts to address the difficulties clearly evident over the past few decades, particularly the difficulty of conducting a trial by jury in a small number of fraud and other financial cases.
	It is vital that we have a system that is able to deal effectively with all kinds of crime. Trial without jury in serious and complex fraud cases will redress the existing imbalance between everyday frauds, which are readily brought to justice, and a few spectacular white-collar cases, in which the full criminality alleged against the defendant cannot always be exposed. Justice is not done when jurors have to reach verdicts on truncated versions of the facts in severed cases, when the totality of offending is not exposed. Certainly, that is not justice for the victims. Trial without jury will also spare those citizens who are selected to serve in such cases the intolerable burden of hearing a case that lasts for many months, or even a year or more. It will avoid trials collapsing as jurors become ill, refuse to continue, despair, or drop out for numerous other genuine reasons.
	The case for change has commanded general support. In 2003, the former Master of the Rolls, Lord Donaldson of Lymington, who I understand always commanded the strong support of Conservative Ministers, supported the Government's proposals. The Government are very supportive of trial by jury, but would agree strongly with Baroness Scotland, who said, when speaking on these matters in another place:
	"The threshold for non-jury trial is a high one, and deliberately so. Where it is necessary in the interests of justice looked at in the round for a case to be conducted without a jury we would ask, what possible case can there be for doing anything else?"—[ Official Report, House of Lords, 19 November 2003;Vol. 654, c. 1943.]
	Lord Justice Auld said that he was
	"firmly of the view that we should wait no longer before introducing a more just and efficient form of trial in serious and complex fraud cases".
	If Opposition Members will not listen to any of the lord justices and other people I have mentioned, they will surely take note of a certain Polly Toynbee, who wrote in  The Guardian last November:
	"There are only a handful of major cases a year—but they are extremely serious. Big-time fraudsters are getting off very lightly compared with the pathetic trail of inept small frauds by clumsy, often desperate amateurs who are easily caught and sentenced. So if you want to cheat, do it big enough and you will probably escape with your millions."
	She went on to say:
	"The Government proposes that any non-jury case would need agreement from the Lord Chief Justice...Consider that no jury hears the 90 per cent. of cases dealt with by magistrates, where the humbler folk can get a one-year sentence. But the lure of grandstanding over the sanctity of jury trials may be irresistible for the opposition".

Joan Ryan: A series of high-profile cases—Maxwell, Blue Arrow, da Costa, the Talbot Village Trust case in 2004, Cushnie and others in 2004, and the Jubilee line case and the Global Wildlife Trust case in 2005—have raised concerns. There is a long track record of fraud case problems. That is why we have decided to deal with fraud in particular, and it is why we have no plans to extend this provision to a wider range of cases. The proposal has had a long gestation, and no other area of law can claim that. The Government are disappointed that no agreement with the main Opposition parties has been forthcoming, in spite of our best efforts. We take the view that the time has come to give effect to the provision that Parliament passed in 2003. We remain certain of the importance of the measure, and we are confident that our arguments will be convincing.
	I commend the Bill to the House and ask hon. Friends and hon. Members to support its Second Reading.

FRAUD (TRIALS WITHOUT A JURY) Bill (PROGRAMME)

Andrew George: I wish to present a petition on behalf of more than 38,600 supporters in west Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly in my constituency. I am pleased that my hon. Friend the Member for North Cornwall (Mr. Rogerson) and the hon. Member for Falmouth and Camborne (Julia Goldsworthy) are present to witness its delivery.
	There are two small and excellent acute hospitals in my constituency, two of the three in the Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust. Like many local people, I feel that we have been in perpetual campaign mode over the past decade or more in trying to protect those hospitals. It is seriously unwise and a dangerous folly to put all the emergency eggs in one basket at Treliske, excellent as that hospital is and dedicated as the staff may be.
	The Royal Cornwall Hospitals NHS Trust ended the year with a deficit of £15.6 million. That raises the fear that acute services at St Michael's hospital and emergency services at West Cornwall hospital will be threatened. On 27 August, 27,000 people marched through my home town of Hale in support of the two hospitals. Feelings are running high, and Ministers simply cannot pass the buck to those whom they have appointed to run the services.
	The petition states:
	The People of West Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly declare our support for the cross-party (and non-party political) campaign to oppose any plans to reduce or close hospital services at St Michael's or Penzance; express our dismay that NHS money is being used to build up and support private hospitals while the Trust is contemplating the closure of the excellent St Michael's Hospital; object to the waste of money on administrative gimmicks rather than frontline public services; demand an Independent Review of hospital services and for fair funding; support an increase in emergency as well as acute and diagnostic services in the West of Cornwall.
	The Petitioners therefore request that the House of Commons expresses its support of this campaign to save two of west Cornwall's most crucial public services.
	 To lie upon the Table.

Angela Eagle: As a great supporter of the concept of pathways to work, I rise to share with the House the early experiences of the programme in Wirral and to note the results so far. I also hope to draw some useful conclusions about future effectiveness.
	When I was a Minister at what is now the Department for Work and Pensions, I was closely involved in the transformation of the then Benefits Agency into what is now known as Jobcentre Plus. The aim was to retool the Government's administrative apparatus and ensure that we could deliver a more active labour market, and hence try to offer more positive choices for those of working age who had found themselves having to claim benefits. Since that time, the new deal has blossomed and laid the groundwork for the national presence of the personal adviser-led pathways to work programme, which has recently arrived in Wirral.
	Although the capacity of the Government to deliver an effective, active labour market service to claimants has risen substantially since 1997, so have the needs of those who are still left without work after well over a decade of economic growth and the creation of2.5 million extra jobs. In the Wirral area, the proportion of people of working age claiming incapacity benefit or income support and therefore eligible to enter the pathways to work programme is11 per cent. That is by no means one of the highest figures in the country, but it is not one of the lowest either.
	That means that substantial numbers of our fellow citizens are finding access to work difficult because of illness or injury. In some of the electoral wards that I represent, levels of incapacity benefit and income support claims are even higher than that. It is difficult to see how such areas can share fully in the rising prosperity of the country and benefit from our growing economy when they have so many people workless and stuck on benefits. It is our duty to reach out to try to help them.
	Life on incapacity benefit is not easy, as the levels of payment are hardly generous. That is especially true if the individual is out of work for any length of time. Yet Government figures show that the average length of time that incapacity benefit recipients spend out of work is increasing. When the benefit was first created in 1985, an individual could expect to spend an average of three years out of work; that has now gone up to nine years. That means that those who fall out of the labour market and on to incapacity benefit are finding it increasingly hard to get back into work. That is the case despite a buoyant labour market. We must work out why that is, and seek to address it effectively, if we are to spread opportunity throughout the country and ensure that no one is left behind.
	The pathways to work national programme was begun in 2002 in order to achieve progress in that important area. Initial research demonstrated that of the 2.7 million people receiving incapacity benefit, 1 million wished to find work. A good proportion volunteered to go on to pathways programmes because they rightly saw them as helpful and beneficial. Perhaps surprisingly, experience in the initial pilots demonstrated that the main barriers to incapacity benefit recipients finding work were to do not with the health condition that had probably led them to claim benefit in the first place, but with their loss of confidence after spending time out of work or having had some trauma in their lives, their lack of skills, and worries about being able to leave benefits safely. Therefore, suggesting effective ways to tackle these problems was an obvious design priority for the programme.
	 It being Seven o'clock, the motion for the Adjournment of the House lapsed, without Question put.
	 Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn .—[Steve McCabe.]

Angela Eagle: Initial results nationally also showed that three chronic conditions accounted for three quarters of all the health complaints of those who ended up claiming incapacity benefit. Some 35 per cent. had mental health issues such as stress and depression, 22 per cent. had musculoskeletal conditions such as neck or back problems, and 11 per cent. had cardiovascular conditions such as high blood pressure, respiratory illness or angina.
	Pathways to work came to Wirral as part of phase two of the national implementation strategy on 24 April. New incapacity benefit claimants now get immediate access to help by being given a mandatory work-focused interview within two months of their initial claim. Some cases involving serious medical conditions are waived at this stage; other claimants, however, are interviewed every month and assisted in a plan to get back to work quickly, before a lack of confidence has time to become established. Initial results in my locality show that this is working well.
	The very good news is that in the first six months, 352 people in the district, 120 of whom are from the Wirral, have been enabled to move off incapacity benefit and into work. That shows that the programme is effective even for those who have been seen as the hardest to help. I am enthusiastic about this and I want it to continue, but I want more people to be helped more quickly. I ask my hon. Friend the Minister to consider the steps that could be taken to spread this opportunity further and faster in the Wirral and elsewhere.
	I know that effort is also being made to contact and motivate those who have been on benefit for some time. As a first phase, Jobcentre Plus contacted 800 existing claimants in the Wirral, asking about their condition and whether they would like access to the assistance that pathways can offer. The response rate was unusually high, and it became clear from the responses how great a problem stress and depression has developed into. Instead of such lower-level mental illness accounting for a 35 per cent. share of the big three chronic conditions causing incapacity benefit claims, as it does nationally, the figure locally is an astonishing 86 per cent. Only 9 per cent. of claims are caused by physical conditions. Stress and depression thus appears to be by far the main barrier to work among benefit claimants of working age. That might not be such a surprising conclusion, on reflection, because we know, for example, that being jobless can ultimately cause depression. This can be made worse by the lack of confidence that often results from struggling on benefits and losing the sense of self-worth that comes from employment.
	In my advice surgeries, I all too often come across people whose mental well-being has been destroyed by bullying at work, which not only causes them to leave their existing employment but often destroys their future employment prospects. Can my hon. Friend the Minister say whether the Government have any plans to address this hidden but costly problem and to minimise the undoubted costs to our economy?
	I have spent some time talking to the dedicated staff who are delivering the in-work support and the condition management programme that pathways can offer to incapacity benefit recipients. They, too, are struck by the huge effect that stress and depression appears to be having on the life chances of many people. In the first six months of the programme, 138 people across the district were referred to the condition management programme, which is provided in the Wirral by the local primary care trust. I met some of the very committed nurses and psychologists who support this invaluable and hitherto unavailable service. They use cognitive behaviour therapy to assist people in managing poor health and stress, and they also assist them in developing more positive feelings of well-being. Some of that involves advice on diet and exercise and pain management, and on such disparate things as goal-setting in life, and even relaxation techniques.
	The programme begins with an understanding that years out of work can destroy confidence and impairs the ability to face challenges without destructive anxiety. It goes on to teach claimants how to overcome such barriers. It does not provide medical treatment and is therefore complementary to existing NHS services. Participation is entirely voluntary. Many benefit recipients choose to go on the programme, and the early evidence is that it is very valuable. I suspect that it is filling a gap left by the lack of work-based occupational health services and preventive counselling for depression and stress-related conditions. It can prevent people from deteriorating into more serious mental suffering.
	If our experience in the Wirral is anything to go by, the cost of those gaps in health provision, both socially and economically, seem to be far higher than we might previously have imagined. I have read some of the local case studies and they show convincingly just how much stress and anxiety has gone unnoticed and untreated in our society. Over and over again, nurses delivering the condition-management programme reported to me that their questioning of benefit recipients to establish how they had fallen out of the labour market in the first place led them to comment that it was the first time that anyone in the system had bothered to ask them how they were, or offered them any useful advice or support. The early experience of the programme was that such people could get back on their own two feet again with just a little help at the right time.
	In some cases, the response has been positive and instantaneous, with a transformation of the condition and a quick and successful return to work. In achieving that very encouraging result, the return to work credit has been an invaluable tool. It is payable to those who have taken a job earning less than £15,000 a year, and is worth £40 a week for 52 weeks. In other cases, the path back to employment is harder and more difficult to embark on, but there have been some notable success stories, which inspire confidence that the programme will go from strength to strength.
	I wish especially to commend the work of the local administrators programme, in both Jobcentre Plus and the NHS. They are working well together in achieving the initial success that I have highlighted. Some36 personal advisers in the district have received intensive training, 11 of whom operate from the Wirral. The local primary care trust has supplied five case managers to deliver the condition management programme, which is doing so much to offer a helping hand back to meaningful work.
	A further strength of our local programme is the employer engagement activities that have been undertaken. In order to create the potential to place claimants in jobs, it is vital that local employers have their often bad perceptions of incapacity benefit claimants challenged. That has been achieved locally by meeting some of those who have successfully made the transition back into work, and arranging testimony from employers who have hired them. It is a tribute to the positive relationships that have been established with the Merseyside Employer Coalition, and 176 individual employers, that so far 51 people have begun work with those employers.
	Pathways to work in the Wirral has made an encouraging start, but I urge my hon. Friend the Minister to learn the lessons that it is teaching us, especially about the prevalence of stress and depression and the effectiveness of some simple methods to help people deal with them. Above all, will my hon. Friend think about increasing the targets for re-engagement so that more can receive the assistance being offered by the programme? Can he also think about what further co-operation there could be between his Department and the Department of Health to tackle the gaps in provision to help with the effects of stress and depression that have been highlighted by our experience in the Wirral?

Jim Murphy: I am delighted to have the opportunity to respond to the points raised by my hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey (Angela Eagle). I am also delighted that others have taken the opportunity to join us in the Chamber this evening, including my hon. Friends the Members for Falkirk (Mr. Joyce), for Birmingham, Hall Green (Steve McCabe), for Motherwell and Wishaw (Mr. Roy) and the Under-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Garston (Maria Eagle). It is a testimony to their interest in the issue that they are in their places.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey has, as she has said, had much experience in this area, as the content of her comments has proved. She was instrumental in laying the foundations of the Jobcentre Plus interview approach, which has allowed pathways to work to be introduced in the 40 per cent. of the country in which it operates at present.
	It is also an opportune time to have this debate, as tomorrow we will finish the Committee stage of the Welfare Reform Bill, which puts in place a new legislative framework to support people on incapacity benefit. In the past, many of those people have been written off by state or have simply given up on themselves, although which came first is often a moot point. However, a combination of factors has meant that far too many people remain on the benefit for dramatically prolonged periods, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey noted. Although 80 or 90 per cent. of claimants initially want and expect to work, she is right to say that the support has not been in place for them to do so. The Welfare Reform Bill will change the entire dynamic of welfare support for people on incapacity benefit.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey spoke knowledgably about the Merseyside Employer Coalition. While it is essential that we put in place the legislative framework necessary both for the roll-out of Pathways and to underpin people's rights and responsibilities, we must also ensure that employers are engaged. To put it in a crudely economic sense, the Welfare Reform Bill and the initiative, effort and investment involved in pathways amount to a supply-side intervention in the labour market. To make that work, we must make sure that there is employer demand for people whose rebuilt confidence and regained skills bring them closer to the labour market. If they are ready to work, employers will be able and willing to take them on.
	Earlier today, I had the opportunity to visit Sainsbury's London headquarters to celebrate the first anniversary of a fantastic initiative called Workright, which promotes the right to work of people with learning disabilities. I listened to inspirational personal testimonies from the relatively small number of people involved. They said that the initiative had given them greater confidence and self-esteem, and described how the opportunity to work had transformed their lives and their perception of themselves. That is a great testimony to the companies involved and to Mencap, which has played a key role in supporting folk with a learning disability to enter, and remain in, the labour market.
	Supporting people to enter the labour market is only part of the challenge, as we know, but we must keep them there and make sure that they do not continue to bounce backward and forward between work and the benefits system. That is why the engagement of employers is crucial, and why we have to do more in that regard.
	There are some really enlightened and progressive employers in this country. I shall not name any, as to do so would be unfair to any that I do not mention, but they include some of our major companies, and we also have some very enlightened small and medium-sized firms. We must make sure that their good practice is spread more widely.
	Companies seem willing to talk in very positive terms about employing people who have claimed incapacity benefit as a result of a learning disability or a mental or other illness. My hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey is right to say that we must learn the lessons from the Pathways roll-out, both in the north-west of England and across the UK as a whole. For example, the pilot scheme in Somerset makes support available for all incapacity benefit claimants, not just new ones. We will analyse the findings that emerge from that scheme and from some of the other innovations that we are trying within the pathways framework to determine the best environment for national roll-out in the private and voluntary sectors. For that reason, we will look very closely at the experience in the Wirral and elsewhere.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Wallasey also spoke about engaging with the NHS and health providers generally. Of course, a key part of the Welfare Reform Bill—the central thrust of part 1—is the establishment of the employment support allowance, underpinned by the national roll-out of pathways. That will progressively and sensitively encourage people to try to come off incapacity benefit.
	An additional part of our agenda for having a million fewer people on incapacity benefit over a decade is to prevent them from having to be on it in the first place. That will not be by rigidly and punitively tightening the gateway to prevent people from claiming incapacity benefit or employment support allowance, but by making much earlier interventions—through employers, the Department of Health, health professionals and others—on the journey out of work and economic activity to incapacity benefit. In many instances, there are markers or flags, such as fluctuating mental health conditions, during people's experience of that journey and we must make much more coherent interventions when signs of the early evolution of a condition become apparent.